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

CoasterMe: Supporting Informal Workplace Awareness Through the Everyday Behaviour of Drinking

Maintaining awareness of the presence of colleagues can be difficult when collaboration is distributed across separate offices. In this paper we present CoasterMe, a situated desktop widget that leverages the natural behaviour of drinking to support informal awareness of a colleague’s availability in the workplace. A pilot field trial showed that CoasterMe helped coworkers to build in-the-moment awareness of availability and supported an improved understanding of work routines, enhancing social coordination and preventing wasted effort. CoasterMe also created a sense of co-presence and connectedness by making users feel as if they are sharing a drink over distance

Understanding family communication across time zones

Nowadays it has become increasingly common for family members to be distributed in different time zones. These time differences pose specific challenges for communication within the family and result in different communication practices to cope with them. To gain an understanding of current challenges and practices, we interviewed people who regularly communicate with immediate family members living in other time zones. We report primary findings from the interviews, and identify design opportunities for improving the experience of cross time zone family communication

PreHeat: controlling home heating using occupancy prediction

Home heating is a major factor in worldwide energy use. Our system, PreHeat, aims to more efficiently heat homes by using occupancy sensing and occupancy prediction to automatically control home heating. We deployed PreHeat in five homes, three in the US and two in the UK. In UK homes, we controlled heating on a per-room basis to enable further energy savings. We compared PreHeat's prediction algorithm with a static program over an average 61 days per house, alternating days between these conditions, and measuring actual gas consumption and occupancy. In UK homes PreHeat both saved gas and reduced MissTime (the time that the house was occupied but not warm). In US homes, PreHeat decreased MissTime by a factor of 6-12, while consuming a similar amount of gas. In summary, PreHeat enables more efficient heating while removing the need for users to program thermostat schedules

The Acceptance of Domestic Ambient Intelligence Appliances by Prospective Users

Ambient intelligence (AmI) is a growing interdisciplinary area where the focus is shifted towards users instead of merely emphasizing the technological opportunities of AmI. Different methods are employed to understand the adoption of AmI appliances by users. However, these are often small-scale methods that are focused on specific subgroups. Large scale quantitative studies to understand the adoption of AmI appliances are scarce. In this study, a questionnaire was designed to examine how the Dutch people (n = 1221) perceive AmI appliances for domestic settings. Findings show that intention to adopt AmI appliances was low and that respondents had a negative to neutral attitude towards AmI appliances. On the basis of structural equation analysis, results suggest that adoption of AmI appliances could be explained by outcome expectancies of AmI appliances. The potential implications of the findings are discussed