Abstract:Conversational spoken dialogue systems that interact with the user rather than merely reading the text can be equipped with hesitations to manage dialogue flow and user attention. Based on a series of empirical studies, we elaborated a hesitation synthesis strategy for dialogue systems, which inserts hesitations of a scalable extent wherever needed in the ongoing utterance. Previously, evaluations of hesitation systems have shown that synthesis quality is affected negatively by hesitations, but that they result in improvements of interaction quality. We argue that due to its conversational nature, hesitation synthesis needs interactive evaluation rather than traditional mean opinion score (MOS)-based questionnaires. To validate this claim, we dually evaluate our system's speech synthesis component, on the one hand, linked to the dialogue system evaluation, and on the other hand, in a traditional MOS way. We are thus able to analyze and discuss differences that arise due to the evaluation methodology. Our results suggest that MOS scales are not sufficient to assess speech synthesis quality, leading to implications for future research that are discussed in this paper. Furthermore, our results indicate that synthetic hesitations are able to increase task performance and that an elaborated hesitation strategy is necessary to avoid likability issues.

Abstract. The purpose of this Wizard-of-Oz study was to explore the intuitive verbal and non-verbal goal-directed behavior of naïve participants in an intelligent robotics apartment. Participants had to complete seven mundane tasks, for instance, they were asked to turn on the light. Participants were explicitly instructed to consider nonstandard ways of completing the respective tasks. A multi-method approach revealed that most participants favored speech and interfaces like switches and screens to communicate with the intelligent robotics apartment. However, they required instructions to use the interfaces in order to perceive them as competent targets for human-machine interaction. Hence, first important steps were taken to investigate how to design an intelligent robotics apartment in a user-centered and user-friendly manner.Keywords: Social robot • smart home • human-robot interaction • use-case scenario • usability • intuitive design • user-centered design.

The use of Personal Voice Assistants (PVAs) 1 such as Alexa and the Google Assistant is rising steadily, but there is a lack of research investigating common issues and requests of PVAs in the context of smart home control. We address this research question with an online survey (n = 65), using a qualitative evaluation of users' problems and improvement requests. Our analysis leads to a partly hierarchic clustering of issues & recommendations for interaction capabilities of PVAs into seven basic categories, allowing us in turn to derive implications and to condense them into design guidelines for future Human-Agent Interaction (HAI) with PVAs. Specifically, we formulate and elaborate the concepts Authentication & Authorization, Activity-Based Interaction, Situated Dialogue, and Explainability & Transparency as key topics for making progress towards smooth interaction with smart homes.

In this paper we present a first exploratory study investigating the effects of a contingently self-interrupting vs nonself-interrupting virtual agent in a smart home environment who transmits information to a human interaction partner. We tested the hypothesis that self-interruptions are a strategy for keeping the user's attention, as measured by postinteraction information recall. Interestingly, our experiment does not allow us to confirm this hypothesis. In fact, users found the self-interruption strategy to be less-likeable. From our observations, we draw suggestions for future implementations of attention-retainment strategies.

In this paper we present the implementation of a robot, that dynamically hesitates, based on the attention of the human interaction partner. To this end, we outline requirements for a real-time interaction scenario, describe the realization of a disfluency insertion strategy, and present observations from the first tests of the system.