Designing Future In-Vehicle Assistants: Insights from User Imaginations and Experiences

With the integration of electrification, intelligence, and autonomous driving technologies, personalized intelligent vehicle agents (IVAs) have gradually become the focus of innovation. However, research on the relationship between intelligent in-car interaction initiated by IVAs and user characteristics is still insufficient. This study explores how user characteristics affect their expectations of IVAs' interactive scenarios, functions, appearance, and social attributes. Through a questionnaire-based pilot study, as well as a think-aloud experiment and semi-structured interviews based on an experimental car, we evaluated different users' expectations for IVAs' interaction on their characteristics and summarized expectations into four categories: scenarios, functions, appearance, and social attributes. The results show that users' characteristics lead to changes in their preferences for the physical appearance and social attributes of IVAs. Based on these findings, we propose future IVAs' interactive design, emphasizing the importance of multi-modal interactions based on smart materials and personalized and implicit interactions based on artificial general intelligence (AGI).