Online Digital Assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri are very popular and provide a range or services to their users, a key function is their ability to satisfy user information needs from the sources available to them. Users may often regard these applications as providing search services similar to Google type search engines. However, while it is clear that they are in general able to answer factoid questions effectively, it is much less obvious how well they support less specific or exploratory type search tasks. We describe an investigation examining the behaviour of the standard Amazon Alexa for exploratory search tasks. The results of our study show that it not effective in addressing these types of information needs. We propose extensions to Alexa designed to overcome these shortcomings. Our Custom Alexa application extends Alexa's conversational functionality for exploratory search. A user study shows that our extended Alexa application both enables users to more successfully complete exploratory search tasks and is well accepted by our test users.

翻译：在线数字助手（如亚马逊Alexa、谷歌助手、苹果Siri）广受欢迎，能为用户提供多种服务，其核心功能之一是从可用资源中满足用户的信息需求。用户常将这些应用视为类似谷歌搜索引擎的检索服务。然而，尽管这类助手通常能有效回答事实性问题，但在支持非特定或探索性搜索任务方面表现尚不明确。本文研究了标准亚马逊Alexa在探索性搜索任务中的行为特征。研究结果表明，Alexa在应对此类信息需求时效果不佳。我们提出了针对Alexa的扩展方案以克服上述缺陷：自定义Alexa应用程序增强了其在探索性搜索中的对话功能。用户研究表明，扩展后的Alexa应用不仅能帮助用户更成功地完成探索性搜索任务，还获得了测试用户的广泛认可。