Young Children's Reading and Learning with Conversational Agents

Young children increasingly interact with voice-driven interfaces, such as conversational agents (CAs). The social nature of CAs makes them good learning partners for children. We have designed a storytelling CA to engage children in book reading activities. This case study presents the design of this CA and investigates children's interactions with and perception of the CA. Through observation, we found that children actively responded to the CA's prompts, reacted to the CA's feedback with great affect, and quickly learned the schema of interacting with a digital interlocutor. We also discovered that the availability of scaffolding appeared to facilitate child-CA conversation and learning. A brief post-reading interview suggested that children enjoyed their interaction with the CA. Design implications for dialogic systems for young children's informal learning are discussed.