Democratizing Design and Fabrication Using Speech - Exploring co-design with a voice assistant.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and voice interfaces have made possible the digital reincarnation of the draftsperson and craftsperson, capable of designing and producing custom work “to spec” for a reasonable cost. We present findings from an experiment using a Wizard-of-Oz-backed recreation of a voice assistant-based designer; participants describe a holiday ornament of their own imagination to the voice assistant, which elicits details and offers design choices before ultimately “creating” the ornament for the participant. For 8 out of 16 participants, a video channel allows the participant to see the designed object as it is iteratively designed and refined. We offer observations about the nature of the interactions between participants and the voice assistant, as well as quantitative measures of participant-reported cognitive load and predicted and actual satisfaction and accuracy of reproduction. Participants report greater satisfaction with their ornaments and experience reduced cognitive load if they can see them being designed; their expectations are higher if they cannot. 15 of 16 participants would use a voice assistant again for a design task.