Look at Me When I Talk to You: A Video Dataset to Enable Voice Assistants to Recognize Errors

People interacting with voice assistants are often frustrated by voice assistants' frequent errors and inability to respond to backchannel cues. We introduce an open-source video dataset of 21 participants' interactions with a voice assistant, and explore the possibility of using this dataset to enable automatic error recognition to inform self-repair. The dataset includes clipped and labeled videos of participants' faces during free-form interactions with the voice assistant from the smart speaker's perspective. To validate our dataset, we emulated a machine learning classifier by asking crowdsourced workers to recognize voice assistant errors from watching soundless video clips of participants' reactions. We found trends suggesting it is possible to determine the voice assistant's performance from a participant's facial reaction alone. This work posits elicited datasets of interactive responses as a key step towards improving error recognition for repair for voice assistants in a wide variety of applications.