CUI@CSCW: Collaborating through Conversational User Interfaces

Abstract

This virtual workshop seeks to bring together the burgeoning communities centred on the design, development, application, and study of so-called Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs). CUIs are used in myriad contexts, from online support chatbots through to entertainment devices in the home. In this workshop, we will examine the challenges involved in transforming CUIs into everyday computing devices capable of supporting collaborative activities across space and time. Additionally, this workshop seeks to establish a cohesive CUI community and research agenda within CSCW. We will examine the roles in which CSCW research can contribute insights into understanding how CUIs are or can be used in a variety of settings, from public to private, and how they can be brought into a potentially unlimited number of tasks. This proposed workshop will bring together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry to survey the state-of-the-art in terms of CUI design, use, and understanding, and will map new areas for work including addressing the technical, social, and ethical challenges that lay ahead. By bringing together existing researchers and new ideas in this space, we intend to foster a strong community and enable potential future collaborations. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Natural language interfaces; Collaborative and social computing systems and tools.

Alexa as an Active Listener: How Backchanneling Can Elicit Self-Disclosure and Promote User Experience

“…Similar steps can be used to ensure users' privacy regarding their disclosed information to an active smart speaker. In this regard, this study offers implications regarding protecting users' and patients' safety when utilizing conversational user interfaces (CUIs) for therapeutic self-disclosure via active listening (mostly studied in the chatbot context), which has been an ongoing challenge in fostering humanto-CUI collaboration within the CSCW community [61]. Beyond supporting dyadic interactions between CUIs and users, this study also suggests expanded collaboration between those dyads and professional or informal health care providers (e.g., therapists, caretakers), by sharing the responsibilities and supporting collaborative tasks.…”

Let’s Talk About CUIs: Putting Conversational User Interface Design Into Practice

“…• Identify the gaps between academia and industry in terms of methods, tools, and practices used in CUI design and development • Identify key design challenges in the development of CUI devices, and particularly, the tools and practices which are key to the space of developing CUIs which are not yet in existence and require more research This workshop will build upon significant momentum in this area [5,7,9,[20][21][22][23]28]. Over the past 5 years, our small, yet growing CUI community, has successfully brought together researchers and industry practitioners from speech, dialogue, computational linguistics, human-machine interaction, speech interface design and voice UX research.…”

CUI @ Auto-UI: Exploring the Fortunate and Unfortunate Futures of Conversational Automotive User Interfaces

“…The workshop primarily aims to encourage wide-ranging discussions about the future of automotive conversational user interfaces in order to promote future research partnerships between the Auto-UI and CUI communities, following in the tradition of previous "CUI @" workshops [3,4,14,16]. To encourage creative, divergent consideration of the future of this topic, this workshop aims to gamify conversations, drawing inspiration from the "What Could Go Wrong" card game from a previous Auto-UI workshop [13].…”