Conversational Agents for Health and Wellbeing

Conversational agents have increasingly been deployed in healthcare applications. However, significant challenges remain in developing this technology. Recent research in this area has highlighted that: i) patient safety was rarely evaluated; ii) health outcomes were poorly measured, and iii) no standardised evaluation methods were employed. The conversational agents in healthcare are lagging behind the developments in other domains. This one-day workshop aims to create a roadmap for healthcare conversational agents to develop standardised design and evaluation frameworks. This will prioritise health outcomes and patient safety while ensuring a high-quality user experience. In doing so, this workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from HCI, healthcare and related speech and chatbot domains to collaborate on these key challenges

Let’s Talk About CUIs: Putting Conversational User Interface Design Into Practice

As CUIs become more prevalent in both academic research and the commercial market, it becomes more essential to design usable and adoptable CUIs. Though research on the usability and design of CUIs has been growing greatly over the past decade, we see that many usability issues are still prevalent in current conversational voice interfaces, from issues in feedback and visibility, to learnability, to error correction, and more. These issues still exist in the most current conversational interfaces in the commercial market, like the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Siri. The aim of this workshop therefore is to bring both academics and industry practitioners together to bridge the gaps of knowledge in regards to the tools, practices, and methods used in the design of CUIs. This workshop will bring together both the research performed by academics in the field, and the practical experience and needs from industry practitioners, in order to have deeper discussions about the resources that require more research and development, in order to build better and more usable CUIs

“You, Move There!”: Investigating the Impact of Feedback on Voice Control in Virtual Environments

Current virtual environment (VEs) input techniques often overlook speech as a useful control modality. Speech could improve interaction in multimodal VEs by enabling users to address objects, locations, and agents, yet research on how to design effective speech for VEs is limited. Our paper investigates the effect of agent feedback on speech VE experiences. Through a lab study, users commanded agents to navigate a VE, receiving either auditory, visual or behavioural feedback. Based on a post interaction semi-structured interview, we find that the type of feedback given by agents is critical to user experience. Specifically auditory mechanisms are preferred, allowing users to engage with other modalities seamlessly during interaction. Although command-like utterances were frequently used, it was perceived as contextually appropriate, ensuring users were understood. Many also found it difficult to discover speech-based functionality. Drawing on these, we discuss key challenges for designing speech input for VEs

Intelligent Personal Assistant in Business-Context: Key-feature Evaluation for User Acceptance

Background: The usage of intelligent personal assistants (IPA), such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant is increasing significantly, and voice-interaction is relevant for workflows in a business context. Objectives: This research aims to determine IPA characteristics to evaluate the usefulness of specific functions in a simulated production system of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. A new function called explanation-mode is introduced to the scientific community and business world. Methods/Approach: As part of a design science research, an artefact, i.e. an add-on for speech-interaction in business software, was developed and evaluated using a survey among ERP users and researchers. Results: In the area of IPA-features, the search-function and speech input for textual fields were recognised as most useful. The newly introduced feature, the explanation mode, was positively received too. There is no significant correlation between the usefulness of features and participant-characteristics, affinity to technology or previous experience with IPAs in a private context, which is in line with previous studies in the private environment leading to the conclusion that the task attraction is the most important element for usefulness. Conclusions: Most of the participants agreed that the speech-input is not able to fully substitute standard input devices, such as a keyboard or a mouse, so the IPA is recognised as an addition to traditional input methods. The usefulness is rated high especially for speech-input for long text fields, calling up masks and search-functions

Finding a New Voice: Transitioning Designers from GUI to VUI Design

As Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) become widely popular, designers must handle new usability challenges. However, compared to other established domains such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), VUI designers have fewer resources (training support, usability heuris- tics, design patterns) to guide them. On the other hand, GUI-trained designers may also be solicited upon to design VUIs given the in- creased demand for such interfaces. This raises the question: how can we best support such designers as they transition from GUI to VUI design? To answer this, we focus on usability heuristics as a key resource, and conduct several workshops with GUI design experts, exploring how they map their design experience onto VUI design. Based on this, we suggest that the “path of least resistance” to transitioning designers from GUI to VUI may be the adaptation of familiar resources and concepts (such as GUI heuristics) to the VUI design space, instead of the imposition of novel VUI-specific heuristics on GUI-trained designers. This finding can inform the development of design resources that can support the increase demand for VUIs

What Do WEIRD and Non-WEIRD Conversational Agent Users Want and Perceive? Towards Transparent, Trustworthy, Democratized Agents

A majority of researchers who develop design guidelines have WEIRD, adult perspectives. This means we may not have technology developed appropriately for people from non-WEIRD countries and children. We present five design recommendations to empower designers to consider diverse users' desires and perceptions of agents. For one, designers should consider the degree of task-orientation of agents appropriate to end-users' cultural perspectives. For another, designers should consider how competence, predictability, and integrity in agent-persona affects end-users' trust of agents. We developed recommendations following our study, which analyzed children and parents from WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries' perspectives on agents as they create them. We found different subsets of participants' perceptions differed. For instance, non-WEIRD and child perspectives emphasized agent artificiality, whereas WEIRD and parent perspectives emphasized human-likeness. Children also consistently felt agents were warmer and more human-like than parents did. Finally, participants generally trusted technology, including agents, more than people.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figures, submitted to CHI 2023, for associated appendix: https://gist.github.com/jessvb/fa1d4c75910106d730d194ffd4d725d

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

Structural changes in online retailing and the marketing mix: An analysis considering multichannel online retailing and voice dialog interfaces

The online retail environment is expanding, enhancing the possibilities for customers to shop online. On the one hand, a proliferation of online channels establishes a multichannel online retailing landscape, which offers customers more alternatives in terms of where to shop online. On the other hand, a change in the user interaction mode of existing customer touchpoints, from graphics to voice, creates new voice dialog interfaces, which enhance the way with regard to how customers can shop online. In this context, this publication-based dissertation aims to generate theoretical and practical contributions on these two most recent developments in online retailing, i.e., multichannel online retailing and voice dialog interfaces, to improve marketing mix decision-making

Embedding Intelligence. Designerly reflections on AI-infused products

Artificial intelligence is more-or-less covertly entering our lives and houses, embedded into products and services that are acquiring novel roles and agency on users. Products such as virtual assistants represent the first wave of materializa- tion of artificial intelligence in the domestic realm and beyond. They are new interlocutors in an emerging redefined relationship between humans and computers. They are agents, with miscommunicated or unclear proper- ties, performing actions to reach human-set goals. They embed capabilities that industrial products never had. They can learn users’ preferences and accordingly adapt their responses, but they are also powerful means to shape people’s behavior and build new practices and habits. Nevertheless, the way these products are used is not fully exploiting their potential, and frequently they entail poor user experiences, relegating their role to gadgets or toys. Furthermore, AI-infused products need vast amounts of personal data to work accurately, and the gathering and processing of this data are often obscure to end-users. As well, how, whether, and when it is preferable to implement AI in products and services is still an open debate. This condition raises critical ethical issues about their usage and may dramatically impact users’ trust and, ultimately, the quality of user experience. The design discipline and the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field are just beginning to explore the wicked relationship between Design and AI, looking for a definition of its borders, still blurred and ever-changing. The book approaches this issue from a human-centered standpoint, proposing designerly reflections on AI-infused products. It addresses one main guiding question: what are the design implications of embedding intelligence into everyday objects

The Prom Problem: Fair and Privacy-Enhanced Matchmaking with Identity Linked Wishes

In the Prom Problem (TPP), Alice wishes to attend a school dance with Bob and needs a risk-free, privacy preserving way to find out whether Bob shares that same wish. If not, no one should know that she inquired about it, not even Bob. TPP represents a special class of matchmaking challenges, augmenting the properties of privacy-enhanced matchmaking, further requiring fairness and support for identity linked wishes (ILW) – wishes involving specific identities that are only valid if all involved parties have those same wishes. The Horne-Nair (HN) protocol was proposed as a solution to TPP along with a sample pseudo-code embodiment leveraging an untrusted matchmaker. Neither identities nor pseudo-identities are included in any messages or stored in the matchmaker’s database. Privacy relevant data stay within user control. A security analysis and proof-of-concept implementation validated the approach, fairness was quantified, and a feasibility analysis demonstrated practicality in real-world networks and systems, thereby bounding risk prior to incurring the full costs of development. The SecretMatch™ Prom app leverages one embodiment of the patented HN protocol to achieve privacy-enhanced and fair matchmaking with ILW. The endeavor led to practical lessons learned and recommendations for privacy engineering in an era of rapidly evolving privacy legislation. Next steps include design of SecretMatch™ apps for contexts like voting negotiations in legislative bodies and executive recruiting. The roadmap toward a quantum resistant SecretMatch™ began with design of a Hybrid Post-Quantum Horne-Nair (HPQHN) protocol. Future directions include enhancements to HPQHN, a fully Post Quantum HN protocol, and more