1,674 research outputs found
Talk2Care: Facilitating Asynchronous Patient-Provider Communication with Large-Language-Model
Despite the plethora of telehealth applications to assist home-based older
adults and healthcare providers, basic messaging and phone calls are still the
most common communication methods, which suffer from limited availability,
information loss, and process inefficiencies. One promising solution to
facilitate patient-provider communication is to leverage large language models
(LLMs) with their powerful natural conversation and summarization capability.
However, there is a limited understanding of LLMs' role during the
communication. We first conducted two interview studies with both older adults
(N=10) and healthcare providers (N=9) to understand their needs and
opportunities for LLMs in patient-provider asynchronous communication. Based on
the insights, we built an LLM-powered communication system, Talk2Care, and
designed interactive components for both groups: (1) For older adults, we
leveraged the convenience and accessibility of voice assistants (VAs) and built
an LLM-powered VA interface for effective information collection. (2) For
health providers, we built an LLM-based dashboard to summarize and present
important health information based on older adults' conversations with the VA.
We further conducted two user studies with older adults and providers to
evaluate the usability of the system. The results showed that Talk2Care could
facilitate the communication process, enrich the health information collected
from older adults, and considerably save providers' efforts and time. We
envision our work as an initial exploration of LLMs' capability in the
intersection of healthcare and interpersonal communication.Comment: Under submission to CHI202
Challenges and Opportunities for the Design of Smart Speakers
Advances in voice technology and voice user interfaces (VUIs) -- such as
Alexa, Siri, and Google Home -- have opened up the potential for many new types
of interaction. However, despite the potential of these devices reflected by
the growing market and body of VUI research, there is a lingering sense that
the technology is still underused. In this paper, we conducted a systematic
literature review of 35 papers to identify and synthesize 127 VUI design
guidelines into five themes. Additionally, we conducted semi-structured
interviews with 15 smart speaker users to understand their use and non-use of
the technology. From the interviews, we distill four design challenges that
contribute the most to non-use. Based on their (non-)use, we identify four
opportunity spaces for designers to explore such as focusing on information
support while multitasking (cooking, driving, childcare, etc), incorporating
users' mental models for smart speakers, and integrating calm design
principles.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure
Immersive Technologies in Virtual Companions: A Systematic Literature Review
The emergence of virtual companions is transforming the evolution of
intelligent systems that effortlessly cater to the unique requirements of
users. These advanced systems not only take into account the user present
capabilities, preferences, and needs but also possess the capability to adapt
dynamically to changes in the environment, as well as fluctuations in the users
emotional state or behavior. A virtual companion is an intelligent software or
application that offers support, assistance, and companionship across various
aspects of users lives. Various enabling technologies are involved in building
virtual companion, among these, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality
(VR) are emerging as transformative tools. While their potential for use in
virtual companions or digital assistants is promising, their applications in
these domains remain relatively unexplored. To address this gap, a systematic
review was conducted to investigate the applications of VR, AR, and MR
immersive technologies in the development of virtual companions. A
comprehensive search across PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar yielded 28
relevant articles out of a pool of 644. The review revealed that immersive
technologies, particularly VR and AR, play a significant role in creating
digital assistants, offering a wide range of applications that brings various
facilities in the individuals life in areas such as addressing social
isolation, enhancing cognitive abilities and dementia care, facilitating
education, and more. Additionally, AR and MR hold potential for enhancing
Quality of life (QoL) within the context of virtual companion technology. The
findings of this review provide a valuable foundation for further research in
this evolving field
"Mango Mango, How to Let The Lettuce Dry Without A Spinner?'': Exploring User Perceptions of Using An LLM-Based Conversational Assistant Toward Cooking Partner
The rapid advancement of the Large Language Model (LLM) has created numerous
potentials for integration with conversational assistants (CAs) assisting
people in their daily tasks, particularly due to their extensive flexibility.
However, users' real-world experiences interacting with these assistants remain
unexplored. In this research, we chose cooking, a complex daily task, as a
scenario to investigate people's successful and unsatisfactory experiences
while receiving assistance from an LLM-based CA, Mango Mango. We discovered
that participants value the system's ability to provide extensive information
beyond the recipe, offer customized instructions based on context, and assist
them in dynamically planning the task. However, they expect the system to be
more adaptive to oral conversation and provide more suggestive responses to
keep users actively involved. Recognizing that users began treating our LLM-CA
as a personal assistant or even a partner rather than just a recipe-reading
tool, we propose several design considerations for future development.Comment: Under submission to CHI202
Supporting Inclusive Learning Using Chatbots? A Chatbot-Led Interview Study
Supporting student academic success has been one of the major goals for higher education. However, low teacher-to-student ratio makes it difficult for students to receive sufficient and personalized support that they might want to. The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and conversational agents, such as chatbots, has provided opportunities for assisting learning for different types of students. This research aims at investigating the opportunities and requirements of chatbots as an intelligent helper to facilitate equity in learning. We developed a chatbot as an experimental platform to investigate the design opportunities of using chatbots to support inclusive learning. Through a chatbot-led user study with 215 undergraduate students, we found chatbots provide the opportunity to support students who are disadvantaged, with diverse life environments, and with varied learning styles. This could be achieved through an accessible, interactive, and confidential way
LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Assistants: Interaction Patterns, Opportunities, Challenges, and Design Guidelines
Conventional Voice Assistants (VAs) rely on traditional language models to
discern user intent and respond to their queries, leading to interactions that
often lack a broader contextual understanding, an area in which Large Language
Models (LLMs) excel. However, current LLMs are largely designed for text-based
interactions, thus making it unclear how user interactions will evolve if their
modality is changed to voice. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs can
enrich VA interactions via an exploratory study with participants (N=20) using
a ChatGPT-powered VA for three scenarios (medical self-diagnosis, creative
planning, and debate) with varied constraints, stakes, and objectivity. We
observe that LLM-powered VA elicits richer interaction patterns that vary
across tasks, showing its versatility. Notably, LLMs absorb the majority of VA
intent recognition failures. We additionally discuss the potential of
harnessing LLMs for more resilient and fluid user-VA interactions and provide
design guidelines for tailoring LLMs for voice assistance
My Virtual Colleague: A State-of-the-Art Analysis of Conversational Agents for the Workplace
Conversational interfaces at the workplace are not a new idea, but it is only the recent technological advancements that turned what was once a vision into near-future reality. Improved reliability and accuracy enable conversational systems to be used in higher stake environments, such as the workplace. In this work, we perform a literature review on concepts proposed to incorporate Conversational Agents (CA) into the workplace. We found 29 workplace CAs designed for workers that contribute to eight different application domains. Based on the studies of these CAs, we compiled a list of aspects to be considered when designing such CAs and identified starting points for further research
Virtual coaches for healthy lifestyle
Since the introduction of the idea of the software interface agent the question recurs whether these agents should be personified and graphically visualized in the interface. In this chapter we look at the use of virtual humans in the interface of healthy lifestyle coaching systems. Based on theory of persuasive communication we analyse the impact that the use of graphical interface agents may have on user experience and on the efficacy of this type of persuasive systems. We argue that research on the impact of a virtual human interface on the efficacy of these systems requires longitudinal field studies in addition to the controlled short-term user evaluations in the field of human computer interaction (HCI). We introduce Kristina, a mobile personal coaching system that monitors its user’s physical activity and that presents feedback messages to the user. We present results of field trials (N = 60, 7 weeks) in which we compare two interface conditions on a smartphone. In one condition feedback messages are presented by a virtual animated human, in the other condition they are displayed on the screen in text. Results of the field trials show that user motivation, use context and the type of device on which the feedback message is received influence the perception of the presentation format of feedback messages and the effect on compliance to the coaching regime
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