Evaluating multi-agent conversational interfaces in the early stages of the design process

In this paper we describe a mixed-approach technique to understand user’s perceptions of concepts in the early stage of the design process. We designed an evaluation study to understand desirability of a multi-agent cognitive investment advisor, a Chabot. The study was threefold. First participants watched the video, then chose reaction card adjectives to report their perceptions, and lastly gave their opinions guided by questions about the multi-party dialogue. From this experiment, we gather positive and negative reactions from users that helped to shape the user experience of cognitive investment advisors.Â

Understanding and improving SIGCHI's volunteer experience

Volunteering underpins SIGCHI’s work, but volunteer efforts are coming under huge stress across SIGCHI’s venues and activities - at conferences, supporting local SIGs, and in its various committees. This article explores why people volunteer and what the SIGCHI Volunteer Development Committee roadmap is

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@IUI: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Intelligent Conversational User Interface Interactions

This workshop aims to bring together the Intelligent User Inter- face (IUI) and Conversational User Interface (CUI) communities to understand the theoretical and methodological challenges in designing, deploying and evaluating CUIs. CUIs have continued to prosper with the increased use and technological developments in both text-based chatbots and speech-based systems. However, challenges remain in creating established theoretical and method- ological approaches for CUIs, and how these can be used with recent engineering advances. These include assessing the impact of inter- face design on user behaviours and perceptions, developing design guidelines, understanding the role of personalisation and issues of ethics and privacy. Our half-day multidisciplinary workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from the IUI and CUI communities in academia and industry. We aim to (1) identify and map out key focus areas and research challenges to address these critical theoretical and methodological gaps and (2) foster strong relationships between disciplines within and related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)