Can you talk or only touch-talk

A lot of the communication at the workplace -via the phone as well as face-to-face -occurs in inappropriate contexts, disturbing meetings and conversations, invading personal and corporate privacy, and more broadly breaking social norms. This is because both, callers and visitors in front of closed office doors, face the same problem: they can only guess the other person's current availability for a conversation. We present a context-aware Virtual Secretary designed to facilitate more socially appropriate communication at the workplace. This service aims towards understanding a person's activity in smart offices, and passes on important contextual information to callers and visitors in order to facilitate more informed human decisions about how and when to initiate contact. We have deployed this Virtual Secretary in the office of a senior researcher, mediating all his actual phone calls and in-person meetings for several weeks. With the Virtual Secretary active, the number of inappropriate workplace interruptions could be significantly reduced.

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Can you talk or only touch-talk

Cited by 2 publications

References 15 publications

Tactful calling: investigating asymmetric social dilemmas in mobile communications

Tactful calling: investigating asymmetric social dilemmas in mobile communications

A context-aware virtual secretary in a smart office environment

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