Usability guidelines and evaluation criteria for conversational user interfaces: a heuristic and linguistic approach

Even though conversational user interfaces (CUI) have been studied since the 1950s, it is not yet fully understood what makes them feel natural, intuitive and usable. As a result, their design and evaluation poses major challenges. In this paper, we discuss how CUIs are different from other forms of human computer interaction, and what challenges and opportunities arise from these differences. We provide an overview of relevant linguistic principles for a natural language conversation and look at established high-level usability heuristics to derive a set of 53 technology-agnostic checkpoints specifically for text-based CUIs (a.k.a chatbots). These checkpoints have been evaluated with 15 professionals and academics from the fields of User Experience, Natural Language Processing, Conversation Analysis and linguistics to examine content validity. The resulting list of checkpoints provides both guidelines for the design and criteria for the evaluation of chatbots

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon on BBC radio, 1946-1976

This article, the first academic discussion of Greek tragedy on BBC Radio, offers a historical outline of the production of Aeschylus’ Oresteia plays from the inaugural Greek tragedy on the Third Programme in 1946 to a landmark experimental production on Radio 3 thirty years later. This case-study demonstrates the importance of the radio medium in the reception history of Greek tragedy in twentieth-century Britain, and opens up discussion of the social and cultural impact of these productions. The radio medium, in permeating cultural, economic, and geographical boundaries, undoubtedly brought knowledge and experience of Greek tragedy in performance to an audience which was at once massive and diverse, and situated beyond the theatrical and educational spheres usually occupied by Greek tragedy. Attention is focused on the collaborative relationship between radio producers (such as Val Gielgud, Raymond Raikes, and John Theocharis) and translators and writers (such as Louis MacNeice, Philip Vellacott and Gabriel Josipovici), which secured a steady flow of new scripts for production, introductory talks for broadcast, and explanatory articles for publication in the Radio Times. The process also, importantly, encouraged the emerging function of the producer as textual editor for the medium, manipulating the script for realization in the visualizing imagination of the listener