Reflecting on the study of mobile collocated interactions: the changing face of wearable devices

Wearables, unlike smartphones, typically afford increasingly private or discrete interactions that are invisible to the casual observer. This shifting paradigm of device interaction combined with the increasing popularity of wearables presents an exciting opportunity for researchers to reflect on existing qualitative methodologies employed in observational studies of mobile collocated interactions, and how these can be adapted to the changing landscape of techno- logical interaction. This position paper discusses some of these methodologies, and questions the suitability of these approaches with respect to the changing form that devices can take

What’s in a name and does CUI matter?

In this paper, I provide some thoughts on the moniker that adorns our conference and technology: CUI. The name has proven to be problematic, as evidenced through many provocation papers in prior CUI conferences. The name presents a mismatch or a promise that is not necessarily fulfilled by the technology. But what of this? The name serves us well as a provocation itself, to think and reflect. However, we must still be cautious: to learn from the past, pre-occupying ourselves with metaphor risks a poor user experience

Progressivity for Voice Interface Design

Drawing from Conversation Analysis (CA), we examine how the orientation towards progressivity in talk---keeping things moving---might help us better understand and design for voice interactions. We introduce progressivity by surveying its explication in CA, and then look at how a strong preference for progressivity in conversation works out practically in sequences of voice interaction recorded in people's homes. Following \citeauthor{sti06}'s work on progressivity, we find our data shows: how non-answer responses impede progress; how accounts offered for non-answer responses can lead to recovery; how participants work to receive answers; and how, ultimately, moving the interaction forwards does not necessarily involve a fitted answer, but other kinds of responses as well. We discuss the wider potential of applying progressivity to evaluate and understand voice interactions, and consider what designers of voice experiences might do to design for progressivity. Our contribution is a demonstration of the progressivity principle and its interactional features, which also points towards the need for specific kinds of future developments in speech technology

Designing an Adaptive Embodied Conversational Agent for Health Literacy: a User Study

Access to healthcare advice is crucial to promote healthy societies. Many factors shape how access might be constrained, such as economic status, education or, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, remote consultations with health practitioners. Our work focuses on providing pre/post-natal advice to maternal women. A salient factor of our work concerns the design and deployment of embodied conversation agents (ECAs) which can sense the (health) literacy of users and adapt to scaffold user engagement in this setting. We present an account of a Wizard of Oz user study of `ALTCAI’, an ECA with three modes of interaction (i.e., adaptive speech and text, adaptive ECA, and non-adaptive ECA). We compare reported engagement with these modes from 44 maternal women who have differing levels of literacy. The study shows that a combination of embodiment and adaptivity scaffolds reported engagement, but matters of health-literacy and language introduce nuanced considerations for the design of ECAs

"Do Animals Have Accents?": Talking with Agents in Multi-Party Conversation

In this paper we unpack the use of conversational agents, or so-called intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), in multiparty conversation amongst a group of friends while they are socialising in a café. IPAs such as Siri or Google Now can be found on a large proportion of personal smartphones and tablets, and are promoted as ‘natural language’ interfaces. The question we pursue here is how they are actually drawn upon in conversational practice? In our work we examine the use of these IPAs in a mundane and common-place setting and employ an ethnomethodological perspective to draw out the character of the IPA-use in conversation. Additionally, we highlight a number of nuanced practicalities of their use in multi-party settings. By providing a depiction of the nature and methodical practice of their use, we are able to contribute our findings to the design of IPAs

ALTCAI: Enabling the Use of Embodied Conversational Agents to Deliver Informal Health Advice during Wizard of Oz Studies

We present ALTCAI, a Wizard of Oz Embodied Conversational Agent that has been developed to explore the use of interactive agents as an effective and engaging tool for delivering health and well-being advice to expectant and nursing mothers in Nigeria. This paper briefly describes the motivation and context for its creation, ALTCAI's various components, and presents a discussion on its adaptability and potential uses in other contexts, as well as on potential future work on extending its functionality

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

CUI@CHI: Mapping Grand Challenges for the Conversational User Interface Community

The aim of this workshop is twofold. First, it aims to grow critical mass in Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) research by mapping the grand challenges in designing and researching these interactions. Second, this workshop is intended to further build the CUI community with these challenges in mind, whilst also growing CUI research presence at CHI. In particular, the workshop will survey and map topics such as: interaction design for text and voice-based CUI; the interplay between engineering efforts such as in Natural language Processing (NLP) and the design of CUI; practical CUI applications (e.g. human-robot interaction, public spaces, hands-free and wearables); and social, contextual, and cultural aspects of CUI design (e.g. ethics, privacy, trust, information exploration, persuasion, well-being, or decision-making, marginalized users). By drawing from the diverse interdisciplinary expertise that defines CHI, we are proposing this workshop as a platform on which to build a community that is better equipped to tackle an emerging field that is rapidly-evolving, yet is under-studied—especially as the commercial advances seem to outpace the scholarly research in this space

CUI@CSCW: Inclusive and Collaborative Child-facing Voice Technologies

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), from online chatbots to smart speakers, are increasingly being used to support children and family activities. This virtual workshop seeks to bring together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry who are interested in the design, development, application, and study of CUIs with a focus on children and family based interactions. We aim to examine the challenges involved in designing and developing CUIs that are capable of supporting everyday activities of children and families. Furthermore, we will also discuss the insights CSCW research can provide into understanding how CUIs can participate in collaborative activities of children and families. By bringing together existing researchers and new ideas in this space, we intend to map new areas of work including addressing the technical, social, and ethical challenges that lay ahead. Additionally, this workshop seeks to foster a strong community and enable potential future collaborations on this important topic