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Voice assistants (VAs) are predicted to develop from merely reactive to increasingly proactive agents in the future. While proactivity allows a leap towards more intelligent conversations with VAs, designing proactive agents is not straightforward, as benefit and acceptance of proactive behavior is dependent on a plethora of factors. For instance, proactive agents run the risk of disrupting users who are already engaged in ongoing primary tasks. While a large body of research is therefore concerned with when to proactively interrupt users, how to interrupt them has received less attention. To close this gap, a driving simulator study was conducted to find linguistic best practices for designing proactive prompts in German. Low linguistic complexity as well as suggestive rather than imposing language were found to influence study participants' preferences for proactive prompts. These findings underline that the existing framework for designing proactive interactions needs to be enhanced by nuanced linguistic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological advancements over the past years have led to a leap in Conversational User Interface (CUI) performance. However, interactions with CUIs are not error-free and error handling thus plays a crucial role in CUI design. So far, CUI repair strategies oftentimes neglect what is known from Human-Human Interaction (HHI). The present work borrows from human-centered error handling and applies the principle of Least Collaborative Effort to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). A within-subjects WoZ driving simulator study (n = 48) is conducted to examine user preferences qualitatively and quantitatively for seven error handling strategies in an automotive setting. Our findings show that human-centered repair strategies comply with the principle of Least Collaborative Effort and lead to significantly lower repair costs than a classic HCI error handling strategy. These results introduce costs as a measurement tool for examining strategy preferences when repairing erroneous dialogs and offer assistance for designing user-centric error handling strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]