Kyoko Sugisaki (short bio)

University Zurich, Switzerland

Andreas Bleiker (short bio)

yasashii llc, Switzerland

Objectives:

Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) have become very popular in recent years. Even though CUIs have been studied for more than 50 years, it is not fully understood what makes them feel natural, intuitive and usable. As a result, their design and evaluation poses major challenges in practice, and most of the existing solutions in industries fail to become adopted by users and are rapidly abandoned by the providers.

Content and benefits:

An introduction to conversation analysis, prototyping and evaluation of CUIs through a mix of theory, sharing best-practices and hands-on exercises. We cover:

• state-of-the-art of CUIs
• typology of use cases and CUIs
• Uniqueness of CUIs as a form of HCI
• Challenges & opportunities for CUIs
• relevant linguistic principles for a natural and efficient conversation
• 50+ checkpoints to apply in design and evaluation

Target Audience:

Our tutorial is for anyone who wants to learn about what is really required to make a CUI successful with users and wants to understand the linguistic foundations behind a good conversation/dialog. We address academics and practitioners from technology and UX backgrounds and offer a mix between business, technology and user perspectives. As this is a multidisciplinary tutorial (HCI, language technology and study), it is suitable for beginners as well as advanced participants in the field of CUI and will help people to bridge the gaps between the disciplines.

Additional Platform to be used:

We will use mural.co or miro.com for some of the exercises. Participants are not required to have any account, but can join as guests.

List of materials or devices required by the participants:

Participants are invited to bring their favorite chatbots or conversational user interfaces (if any).