“After she fell asleep, it went to my next podcast, which was about a serial killer”: Unveiling Needs and Expectations Regarding Parental Control within Digital Assistant

Voice-based digital assistants (for brevity, we term them as ‘digital assistants’ in this paper, unless otherwise specified) are getting increasingly popular in the household to automate digital routines. Hence, with communal usage of digital assistants in the household, children can gain access to content through digital assistants that are intended for adult audiences and parents are concerned about such risks. To this end, we created a low-fidelity prototype with designs of existing Google’s parental control for Google Assistant (termed as baseline), along with our features deriving from prior literature (termed as treatment). Then, we conducted a semi-structured interview with 7 parents to understand their perceptions, needs, and expectations surrounding parental control within digital assistants. As reflected in our results, digital assistants can play different roles in stimulating open communication between parents and children, augmenting parenting responsibilities to induce self-regulation and impulse control in children, and setting boundaries with granularity.