The purpose of this research thesis is to investigate technologies effects on learning. Specifically the researchers studied the usability of intelligent personal assistant-enabled devices for learning assistance. It is assumed that using technology in educational context helps both students and educators because there is a positive effect on engagement which increases learning curves. Although, this is not always the case. The present study yielded results that were not consistent with the assumption that using any type of technology as an aid for learning has a positive effect. Further research will seek to investigate other intelligent personal assistant devices for classroom use.

Loneliness among older adults is a problem with severe consequences to individual health, quality of life, cognitive capacity, and life-expectancy. Although approaches towards improving the quality and quantity of social relationships are the prevailing model of therapy, older adults may not always be able to form these relationships due to either personality factors, decreased mobility, or isolation. Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), virtual agents, and social robotics offer an opportunity for the development of technology that could potentially serve as social companions to older adults. The present study explored whether an IPA could potentially be used as a social companion to older adults feeling lonely. Additionally, the research explored whether the device has the potential to generate social presence among both young and older adults. Results indicate that while the devices do show some social presence, participants rate the device low on some components of social presence, such as emotional contagion. This adversely affects the possibility of a social relationship between an older adult and the device. Analysis reveals ways to improve social presence in these devices.

La creciente popularidad y las capacidades mejoradas de los asistentes personales inteligentes, como Google Assistant, Siri y Alexa, han permitido su aplicación en numerosos campos, algunos de los cuales son: servicio al cliente, banca y turismo. No obstante, la aplicación de estos asistentes para la capacitación y el aprendizaje de trabajadores profesionales ha sido limitada y no ha sido bien investigada.   El presente documento validará la propuesta de una solución para la capacitación continua y el aprendizaje de los visitadores médicos sobre la información de los medicamentos mediante el uso de un agente de conversación basado en la voz. Esto permitirá que los representantes de ventas farmacéuticas puedan preguntar al agente acerca de las propiedades de los medicamentos y realizar exámenes frecuentes sobre la información disponible para verificar su conocimiento. Esta validación se realizará a través del seguimiento y aplicación de una metodología de investigación centrada en las soluciones y arquitecturas existentes que brinden una base para iniciar el desarrollo del proyecto. / The increasing popularity and enhanced capabilities of intelligent personal assistants, such as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa, have allowed them to disrupt in many fields, some of which are: customer service, banking, and tourism. Notwithstanding, the application of intelligent personal assistants for training and learning of professional workers has been limited and not well researched. This document will validate the proposal of a solution for the continuous training and learning of the medical visitors on the information of the medications using a voice-based conversation agent. This will allow pharmaceutical sales representatives to ask the agent about the properties of the drugs and conduct frequent reviews of the information available to verify their knowledge. This validation will be carried out through the monitoring and application of a research methodology focused on the existing solutions and architectures that provide a basis to start the development of the project. / Trabajo de investigación

The largest software companies in the world are racing to develop their Intelligent Personal Assistants. Each with more and more capabilities and ways for users to access them. The different assistants have different capabilities and one of the ways the companies are differentiating is in the interaction techniques their assistants that are controlled with, most uses voice, and some uses text. This thesis walks through these interaction techniques, give a brief overview of intelligent personal assistants today and explores how learnability differentiate when using these interaction techniques. The thesis also investigates when users have access to multiple interaction techniques to use in combination when interacting with such an assistant. To evaluate the field, a literature study was conducted covering Intelligent Personal Assistants, interaction techniques, conversational user interfaces, modalities, multimodal interaction, voice and chat interfaces. Interviews with early adopters of Intelligent Personal Assistants was performed to better understand the current state of the technology and how users were using it. To evaluate the learnability differences in different interaction techniques, a series of user tests in a wizard-of-oz setup was conducted. In the user tests the different groups was using different interaction techniques to interact with their assistants. The main findings of the user tests was that there are indications to that the type of language used differs depending on the interaction techniques. Users who interact through voice is more prone to use a more natural language, while users using a chat interface quickly started to treat the interactions with the Intelligent Personal Assistant as commands. The result observed was that users who interacted with the assistant using chat and then switched to interacting through voice used a shorter, more command-like language when they interacted through voice as well.