Text and voice based Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) are becoming pervasive. These interfaces are commonplace in consumer-level devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home as well as customer service enterprise systems. Although currently used for simple tasks, such as setting alarms, playing and controlling music, or requesting the weather, there is a significant drive to increase the complexity and capability of interaction with these systems to more closely resemble conversation. The interest in CUI interactions from the HCI community is growing and research in this domain is gathering pace. Key challenges are coming to the fore. These include the need to (1) understand and identify the parameters of appropriate CUI design; (2) identify and develop tools and heuristics to support the design of CUIs; (3) map and address ethical, privacy and trust issues surrounding the use and development of CUIs; (4) develop core theoretical concepts to understand and predict user interaction behaviour with these types of interfaces and (5) identify appropriate design for multiple user contexts. Yet the literature and research community in this domain is disparate, with the need to gather critical mass.
This workshop looks to gather researchers, designers and practitioners from a wide range of communities to discuss the need to build this critical mass and develop a truly multi-disciplinary CUI community. To do this we aim bring together some of the leading researchers in these fields, with an interest in CUI based HCI questions to map the work needed to develop the thematic grand challenges identified by recent CUI work.
IMPORTANT DATES
February 11th 2020: Position paper deadline
February 28 2020: Notifiction of acceptance
May 29th, 2020: Workshop Day - 3 pm to 7 pm (BST/UTC+1)