Ethics of Conversational User Interfaces

Building on the prior workshops on conversational user interfaces (CUIs) [2, 40], we tackle the topic of ethics of CUIs at CHI 2022. Though commercial CUI developments continue to rapidly advance, our scholarly dialogue on ethics of CUIs is underwhelming. The CUI community has implicitly been concerned with ethics, yet making it central to the growing body of work thus far has not been adequately done. Since ethics is a far-reaching topic, perspectives from philosophy, design, and engineering domains are integral to our CUI research community. For instance, philosophical traditions, e.g., deontology or virtue ethics, can guide ethical concepts that are relevant for CUIs, e.g., autonomy or trust. The practice of design through approaches like value sensitive design can inform how CUIs should be developed. Ethics comes into play with technical contributions, e.g., privacy-preserving data sharing between conversational systems. By considering such multidisciplinary angles, we come to a special topic of interest that ties together philosophy, design, and engineering: conversational disclosure, e.g., sharing personal information, transparency, e.g., as how to transparently convey relevant information in a conversational manner, and vulnerability of diverse user groups that should be taken into consideratio

Accessible Conversational User Interfaces: Considerations for design

Conversational user interfaces (CUIs), such as chatbots and voice assistants, are increasingly common in areas of day-to-day life, and can be expected to become ever more pervasive in the future. These interfaces are being designed for ever more complex interactions, and they appear to have potential to be beneficial to people with disabilities to interact through the web and with technologies embedded in the environment. However, to fulfil this promise they need to be designed to be accessible. This paper reviews a range of current guidance, reports, research and literature on accessible design for different disability groups, including users with mental health issues, autism, health conditions, cognitive disabilities, dyslexia or learning difficulties, and sensory, mobility or dexterity impairments. We collate the elements from this body of guidance that appear relevant to the design of accessible CUIs, and instances where guidance presents issues which are less conclusive, and require further exploration. Using this, we develop a set of questions which could be useful in the further research and development of accessible CUIs. We conclude by considering why CUIs could present opportunities for furthering accessibility, by introducing an example of this potential – a project to design an assistant to support students to disclose their disabilities and organise support, without the need to fill in forms

CUI@CSCW: Collaborating through Conversational User Interfaces

This virtual workshop seeks to bring together the burgeoning communities centred on the design, development, application and study of so-called Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs). CUIs are used in myriad contexts, from online support chatbots through to entertainment devices in the home. In this workshop, we will examine the challenges involved in transforming CUIs into everyday computing devices capable of supporting collaborative activities across space and time. Additionally, this workshop seeks to establish a cohesive CUI community and research agenda within CSCW. We will examine the roles in which CSCW research can contribute insights into understanding how CUIs are or can be used in a variety of settings, from public to private, and how they can be brought into a potentially unlimited number of tasks. This proposed workshop will bring together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry to survey the state-of-the-art in terms of CUI design, use, and understanding, and will map new areas for work including addressing the technical, social, and ethical challenges that lay ahead. By bringing together existing researchers and new ideas in this space, we intend to foster a strong community and enable potential future collaborations

Don't Believe The Hype!:White Lies of Conversational User Interface Creation Tools

The 2nd International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI 2020), Bilbao, Spain, 23-24 July 2020Following the initial hype and high expectations of conversational user interfaces (CUIs), a number of creation tools have emerged to simplify development of these complex systems. These have the potential to democratise and expand application development to those without programming skills. However, while such tools allow end-user developers to build language understanding and dialog management capability into a CUI application, actually fulfilling or executing an action still requires programmatic API integration. In this paper, we look at how CUI builders that claim to be ``no code required'' struggle to yield more than toy examples, with an aim to provoke the community to develop better tools for CUI creation.Trinity College Dublin (TCD

Ethics of Conversational User Interfaces

Building on the prior workshops on conversational user interfaces (CUIs) [2, 40], we tackle the topic of ethics of CUIs at CHI 2022. Though commercial CUI developments continue to rapidly advance, our scholarly dialogue on ethics of CUIs is underwhelming. The CUI community has implicitly been concerned with ethics, yet making it central to the growing body of work thus far has not been adequately done. Since ethics is a far-reaching topic, perspectives from philosophy, design, and engineering domains are integral to our CUI research community. For instance, philosophical traditions, e.g., deontology or virtue ethics, can guide ethical concepts that are relevant for CUIs, e.g., autonomy or trust. The practice of design through approaches like value sensitive design can inform how CUIs should be developed. Ethics comes into play with technical contributions, e.g., privacy-preserving data sharing between conversational systems. By considering such multidisciplinary angles, we come to a special topic of interest that ties together philosophy, design, and engineering: conversational disclosure, e.g., sharing personal information, transparency, e.g., as how to transparently convey relevant information in a conversational manner, and vulnerability of diverse user groups that should be taken into consideration

CUI @ Auto-UI:Exploring the Fortunate and Unfortunate Futures of Conversational Automotive User Interfaces

This work aims to connect the Automotive User Interfaces (Auto-UI) and Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) communities through discussion of their shared view of the future of automotive conversational user interfaces. The workshop aims to encourage creative consideration of optimistic and pessimistic futures, encouraging attendees to explore the opportunities and barriers that lie ahead through a game. Considerations of the future will be mapped out in greater detail through the drafting of research agendas, by which attendees will get to know each other's expertise and networks of resources. The two day workshop, consisting of two 90-minute sessions, will facilitate greater communication and collaboration between these communities, connecting researchers to work together to influence the futures they imagine in the workshop.Comment: Workshop published and presented at Automotive User Interfaces 2021 (AutoUI 21

Towards Emotion-Sensitive Conversational User Interfaces in Healthcare Applications

Perception of emotions and adequate responses are key factors of a successful conversational agent. However, determining emotions in a healthcare setting depends on multiple factors such as context and medical condition. Given the increase of interest in conversational agents integrated in mobile health applications, our objective in this work is to introduce a concept for analyzing emotions and sentiments expressed by a person in a mobile health application with a conversational user interface. The approach bases upon bot technology (Synthetic intelligence markup language) and deep learning for emotion analysis. More specifically, expressions referring to sentiments or emotions are classified along seven categories and three stages of strengths using treebank annotation and recursive neural networks. The classification result is used by the chatbot for selecting an appropriate response. In this way, the concerns of a user can be better addressed. We describe three use cases where the approach could be integrated to make the chatbot emotion-sensitive