Browsing by Author "Soyoye, Fiyinfoluwa"

Voice-Based Proactive Information Retrieval can support social interactions by augmenting conversations and removing the need for explicit search activity. Previous work introduces the SearchBot, a proactive search agent used to collect data about search behaviour during social interactions. Although prior analyses show that it positively influences the conversations of its users, the research leaves a gap in understanding how it affects their other behaviours. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by analyzing data from a previous study and characterizing the influence of the SearchBot on the behaviours and activities of its users. Our findings show that study participants displayed an increased frequency of engagement with the SearchBot system than with a more traditional search system. In addition, our exploration of the different types of search activities that users perform shows that SearchBot users are able to avoid the most cognitively expensive one (query formulation and typing). The findings also reveal patterns of interaction between the SearchBot system and its users in terms of speech patterns and search behaviours. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide suggestions for future work.