Hello all, We are having our HCI meeting on Tuesday August 13th. The time and location is 12.30 - 2.00, at the DGP seminar room, as usual. We will have Cosmin giving a practice conference plenary talk on designing conversational voice interfaces. Please see more details below:
My dearest Alexa, would you be so kind as to let me know what the bloody weather may be today?
Oscar Wilde once said: “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” This suggests that, for more than four decades, the design and development of interfaces that allow humans to interact more naturally with machines had a significant creativity deficit. While in the early days of dialogue systems and interactive voice responsive applications this could have been largely attributed to engineering limitations, our current expectations and needs challenge our views of what (speech-based) conversational interfaces can and should do for us – beside informing us about the weather. In this talk, I argue that, while currently available interfaces do indeed demonstrate technological progress, inertia in both design and engineering efforts has lead to interfaces that have yet to reach the holy grail: seamless interactions with new media, information, and devices, through natural modalities that transcend the confines of conventional interfaces. The consequences of this are particularly evident within contexts where natural, conversational interfaces may help marginalized users that stand to benefit the most from such technologies, yet fail to sustainably do so. Grounded in more than two decades of research in this space, I deconstruct in this talk some of the claims and myths about spoken conversational interfaces that hold us back from designing truly useful applications. I then discuss how we may approach the design of such interfaces in ways that are not only more imaginative, but that will also lead to the emergence of interactions that are more meaningful and more inclusive to a broader range of users and contexts.
Look forward to seeing you there. Food will be served.
Thanks, Jiannan