5,659 research outputs found
Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time
Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust
than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and
monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high
quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce
Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over
time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more
scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to
automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80
participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself
without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long
been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems;
Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed
system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation
on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain
dialog system.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI'18
CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform
Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of
morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be
significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift
in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with
increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there
is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with
users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a
conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health
intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text
based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the
users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive
healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational
agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and
enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver
tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational
agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and
analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity,
healthy diet and stress management
Smart Conversational Agents for Reminiscence
In this paper we describe the requirements and early system design for a
smart conversational agent that can assist older adults in the reminiscence
process. The practice of reminiscence has well documented benefits for the
mental, social and emotional well-being of older adults. However, the
technology support, valuable in many different ways, is still limited in terms
of need of co-located human presence, data collection capabilities, and ability
to support sustained engagement, thus missing key opportunities to improve care
practices, facilitate social interactions, and bring the reminiscence practice
closer to those with less opportunities to engage in co-located sessions with a
(trained) companion. We discuss conversational agents and cognitive services as
the platform for building the next generation of reminiscence applications, and
introduce the concept application of a smart reminiscence agent
Calendar.help: Designing a Workflow-Based Scheduling Agent with Humans in the Loop
Although information workers may complain about meetings, they are an
essential part of their work life. Consequently, busy people spend a
significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a
system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows.
Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to
the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling
scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a
series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human
otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant who
executes them as unstructured macrotasks. We describe the iterative approach we
used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling
thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings
provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into
repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.Comment: 10 page
Automatic Augmentation of Online Surveys Using Conversational AI
The data quality of open-ended answers gathered via online surveys can be low because of a large proportion of blank, short, or ambiguous responses. However, online surveys do not provide an opportunity to resolve ambiguities or seek elaboration by prompting respondents for additional information. While conversational surveys can overcome this limitation, they are generally not suitable for close-ended questions. This disclosure describes techniques to augment open-ended questions within traditional online surveys by embedding conversational capabilities enabled via an AI agent or chatbot that can be based on a large language model. The conversational AI agent can automatically generate follow-up questions based on responses to open-ended questions. The techniques utilize an appropriately trained conversational AI agent (or chatbot) to automatically include an open-ended question type, e.g., using an embedded data field of type “conversation,” along with relevant variables and scripts to display the conversational experience within the survey webpage, app, or other interface, and to enable information exchange between the conversational interaction and the online survey
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