Designing an Interaction Concept for Assisted Cooking in Smart Kitchens: Focus on Human Agency, Proactivity, and Multimodality

Connected homes and smart assistants shape the future practices of humans, but they do not yet perfectly fit their needs and processes. Our research explores how smart assistants can effectively support users during cooking. First, we completed an observational study with ten participants to understand their needs for competence and autonomy in relation to their individual cooking. Following the empirical results, we prototyped a multimodal assistant that interactively provides stepwise guidance for a multi-part recipe. We evaluated the prototype in a Wizard-of-Oz approach with ten participants. The classification according to cooking competence and need for autonomy turned out to be an efficient way to understand the different user perspectives on the prototype. We could observe under which conditions users prefer graphical or voice interaction and how proactivity of the assistant affects human agency and derived general insights for the design and co-performance of smart assistants in other domains.