The authors of this paper aim to understand the interactional factors that affect conversational agents (CAs) such as Apple\u2019s Siri, Google Now, Amazon\u2019s Alexa, and Microsoft\u2019s Cortana. They conducted interviews with 14 participants (they continued to find participants until theoretical saturation had been reached). They identified the motivations of these users, their type of use, the effort involved in learning to use a CA, user evaluation of the CAs, as well as issues that affect engagement of users. Through their study, the authors found that user expectations were not met by the CAs. They also found that the primary use-case for these CAs was to perform tasks \u2018hands free\u2019\u00a0 and that users were more likely to trust the CA with tasks that needed less precision (such as setting an alarm, or asking about the weather) as compared to tasks that required more precision (such as drafting an email). For the tasks that needed more precision, the users were likely to utilize visual confirmation to ensure that the CA had not made any mistakes. The authors identified that it would help if the CA enabled the users to learn about the systems capabilities in a better manner, as well as if the goals of the system were more clearly defined.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I found this paper to be very\ninteresting, however, given that it was written in 2016, I wonder if a\nfollow-up study has been performed to evaluate CAs and their improvement over\nthe past few years. I liked the description given in the paper about\n\u2018structural patterns\u2019 and how as humans, we often use non-verbal tools to ascertain\nthe mood of another person \u2013 which would be challenging to achieve in the\ncontext of the current conversational agents. I also found it interesting to\nlearn that humans found excess politeness repulsive when they knew that their\ninteraction was with a machine while they expected politeness in case of\ninteractions with humans. I agree that\nthese CAs must be designed in such a way that na\u00efve, uninformed humans would be\nable to use them with ease in everyday situations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I thought it was interesting that\nthe authors mention the lack of the ability of the CAs to bear contextual\nunderstanding between interactions, especially in the case of subsequent\nquestions that might be asked. If the CA were to intend to conduct\nconversations in a more human-like manner, I believe that this is an important\nfactor that must be considered. As someone who isn\u2019t an avid user of CAs, I am\nunaware about the current progress that has been made towards improving this\naspect of CAs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As indicated by the paper, I\nremember having used \u2018play\u2019 as a point of entry when I first starting using my\nGoogle Home \u2013 wherein I used the \u2018Pikachu Talk\u2019 feature. I also found it\ninteresting to learn how, in this case as well, humans form mental models\nregarding the capabilities of the CA systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
SUMMARY The authors of this paper aim to understand the interactional factors that affect conversational agents (CAs) such as Apple\u2019s Siri, Google Now, Amazon\u2019s Alexa, and Microsoft\u2019s Cortana. They conducted interviews with 14 participants (they continued to find participants until theoretical saturation had been reached). They identified the motivations of these users, their type of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":288,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[88,87],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-badpa","tag-class10"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/288"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":850,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions\/850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/cs6724s20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}