"What color are the fish's scales?" Exploring parents' and children's natural interactions with a child-friendly virtual agent during storybook reading

With increasing integration of AI-powered agents into educational technologies available to families with young children, the landscape of how caregivers and children interact together or separately with these technologies is underexplored. Understanding the nature of these interactions could critically inform the design of educational technologies to facilitate children's learning, research methods for use in future studies involving adult-child dyad technology use, and policy decisions regarding the use of educational technology with young children. In this study, we explored the natural interactions among parent, child, and a child-friendly virtual rabbit character named Floppy. Floppy is a virtual agent in a Smart Speaker app that models adult dialogic reading and conversational strategies for use with young children (ages 4-6 years). Over a span of four to six weeks, 18 parent-child dyads read The Rainbow Fish, a classic children's book by Marcus Pfister, during 24 at-home, remote sessions with Floppy. Of the 189 conversations generated during this time, 125 were initiated by a prompt spoken by Floppy. Though there were some variations among the dyads, across all conversations, parent-driven interactions made up 63% of the conversations, followed by child-driven conversations at 15.3%, Floppy-driven at 14.3%, and Floppy-and-parent-driven at 7.4%. A select few parents were more comfortable having their children interact directly with Floppy, whereas the majority of the parents would direct children's attention back to themselves or help children understand the questions by repeating or reformulating Floppy's prompts. More than half of the parents reported that their children formed emotional connections with the virtual character. These findings point to a need to clearly define the role of virtual agents, even ones with limited AI, in this type of triadic interaction.