Design Foundations for AI Assisted Decision Making: A Self Determination Theory Approach

Progress of technology and processing power has enabled the advent of sophisticated technology including Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents. AI agents have penetrated society in many forms including conversation agents or chatbots. As these chatbots have a social component to them, is it critical to evaluate the social aspects of their design and its impact on user outcomes. This study employs Social Determination Theory to examine the effect of the three motivational needs on user interaction outcome variables of a decision-making chatbot. Specifically, this study looks at the influence of relatedness, competency, and autonomy on user satisfaction, engagement, decision efficiency, and decision accuracy. A carefully designed experiment revealed that all three needs are important for user satisfaction and engagement while competency and autonomy is associated with decision accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of considering psychological constructs during AI design. Our findings also offer useful implications for AI designers and organizations that plan on using AI assisted chatbots to improve decision-making efforts

Chatbots for social good

Chatbots are emerging as an increasingly important area for the HCI community, as they provide a novel means for users to interact with service providers. Due to their conversational character, chatbots are potentially effective tools for engaging with customers, and are often developed with commercial interests at the core. However, chatbots also represent opportunities for positive social impact. Chatbots can make needed services more accessible, available, and affordable. They can strengthen users' autonomy, competence, and (possibly counter-intuitively) social relatedness. In this SIG we address the possible social benefits of chatbots and conversational user interfaces. We will bring together the existing, but disparate, community of researchers and practitioners within the CHI community and broader fields who have an interest in chatbots. We aim to discuss the potential for chatbots to move beyond their assumed role as channels for commercial service providers, explore how they may be used for social good, and how the HCI community may contribute to realize this.acceptedVersio

Improving conversational dynamics with reactive speech synthesis

The active exchange of ideas and/or information is a crucial feature of human-human conversation. Yet it is a skill that present-day ‘conversational’ interfaces are lacking, which effectively hampers the dynamics of interaction and makes it feel artificial. In this paper, we present a reactive speech synthesis system that can handle user’s interruptions. Initial results of evaluation of our interactive experiment indicate that participants prefer a reactive system to a non-reactive one. Based on participants’ feedback, we suggest potential applications for reactive speech synthesis systems (i.e. interactive tutor and adventure game) and propose further interactive user experiments to evaluate them. We anticipate that the reactive system can offer more engaging and dynamic interaction and improve user experience by making it feel more like a natural human-human conversation

A Need for Trust in Conversational Interface Research

Across several branches of conversational interaction research including interactions with social robots, embodied agents, and conversational assistants, users have identified trust as a critical part of those interactions. Nevertheless, there is little agreement on what trust means within these sort of interactions or how trust can be measured. In this paper, we explore some of the dimensions of trust as it has been understood in previous work and we outline some of the ways trust has been measured in the hopes of furthering discussion of the concept across the field

Assistance for Mobile Language Learners

The paper reflects on the evolution of mobile language learning and maps the emerging territory of mobile and smart assistance. The concept of ‘mobile assistance’ is a useful way to frame the ways in which mobile devices and applications can provide ad hoc or ongoing support to language learners inside and outside the classroom. The paper outlines various forms of assistance. As intelligent assistants become increasingly available, the learning landscape continues to evolve. An intelligent assistant might amplify human capabilities, or it might hinder their development. Language learners and their teachers are thus caught up in complex scenarios of newly available technologies that are impacting learning practices

Transparency in Language Generation: Levels of Automation

Language models and conversational systems are growing increasingly advanced, creating outputs that may be mistaken for humans. Consumers may thus be misled by advertising, media reports, or vagueness regarding the role of automation in the production of language. We propose a taxonomy of language automation, based on the SAE levels of driving automation, to establish a shared set of terms for describing automated language. It is our hope that the proposed taxonomy can increase transparency in this rapidly advancing field.Comment: Accepted for publication at CUI 202

Business and pleasure? Relational interaction in conversational UX

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Designing an Assistant for the Disclosure and Management of Information about Needs and Support: the ADMINS project

In this paper, we describe accessible design considerations for the Assistants for the Disclosure and Management of Information about Needs and Support project (ADMINS). In ADMINS, artificial intelligence (AI) services are being used to create a virtual assistant (VA), which is being designed to enable students to disclose any disabilities, and to provide guidance and suggestions about appropriate accessible support. ADMINS explores the potential of a conversational user interface (CUI) to reduce administrative burden and improve outcomes, by replacing static forms with written and spoken dialogue. Students with accessibility needs often face excessive administrative burden. A CUI could be beneficial in this context if designed to be fully accessible. At the same time, we recognise the broader potential of CUIs for these types of processes, and the project aims to understand the multiple opportunities and challenges, using participatory design, iterative development and trials evaluations