Voice user interface has become a commercially viable and extensive interaction mechanism with the development of voice assistants. Despite the popularity of voice assistants, the academic community does not utterly understand about what, when, and how users chat with them. Chatting with a voice assistant is crucial as it defines how a user will seek the help of the assistant in the future. This study aims to cover the essence and construct of conversational AI, to develop a classification method to deal with user utterances, and, most importantly, to understand about what, when, and how Chinese users chat with voice assistants. We collected user utterances from the real conventional database of a commercial voice assistant, NetEase Sing in China. We also identified different utterance categories on the basis of previous studies and real usage conditions and annotated the utterances with 17 labels. Furthermore, we found that the three top reasons for the usage of voice assistants in China are the following: (1) greeting, (2) function, and (3) music. Chinese users like to interact with voice assistants at night from 7 PM to 10 PM, and they are polite toward the assistants. The whole percentage of negative feedback utterances is less than 6%, which is considerably low. These findings appear to be useful in voice interaction designs for intelligent hardware.

Abstract
1. Background
2. Introduction of Netease SingCloud Speaker
3. User Utterance Category
4. Methods
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion
REFERENCES

• Ji Wang(Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba) Corresponding Author
• Han Zhang(Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba)
• Cen Zhang(Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba)
• Junjun Xiao(NetEase Hangzhou Network Co. Ltd)
• Seung Hee Lee(Faculty of Art and Design, University of Tsukuba)