Designing natural language output for the IoT.

A large number of devices categorised as "Internet of Things" (IoT) that are in the consumer market are designed to autonomously monitor things of interest to users. These devices often make use of natural language output, more specifically textual messages, as a way to notify users. These messages are commonly simple predetermined strings. Some IoT devices however are designed to report on complex applications, which may be difficult for users without technical domain knowledge to understand. In this work, we present an initial evaluation in which we investigated how users' inclination to attend to a monitoring system is affected by different levels of information. Based our findings, we discuss future avenues of research which we believe will further our understanding of natural language output's application in the IoT domain.