"Soziale virtuelle Assistenz mit LLMs (SoviA) – Methodische Grundlagen eines partizipativen Feldversuchs zur Mensch-KI-Interaktion im Alter"

SOVIA (Social Virtual Assistance with LLMs) is a tablet-based social voice assistant designed for ageing at home. It combines an interchangeable ASR/TTS speech pipeline with an LLM-agnostic dialog core, a biographically structured “challenge” engine that schedules proactive daily prompts, and a privacy-aware user-memory module that stores structured summaries rather than raw transcripts. This talk presents the architecture and its privacy-by-design choices and explains how they enable rigorous in-home evaluation. We outline a four-week field trial with 10 senior households (65+), where participants use SOVIA in everyday life. A mixed-methods protocol triangulates interaction telemetry (e.g., session frequency, turn counts, challenge acceptance/decline, error modes) with pre/post questionnaires and qualitative interviews to assess usability, acceptance, perceived companionship, and potential changes in subjective loneliness. The contribution is a reusable technical blueprint plus an evaluation-ready study design for LLM-based social voice assistance in ageing-well scenarios.