Related papers: "Is there anything else I can help you with?": Cha…
From 2016 to 2018, we developed and deployed Chorus, a system that blends real-time human computation with artificial intelligence (AI) and has real-world, open conversations with users. We took a top-down approach that started with a…
Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high quality,…
Real-time crowd-powered systems, such as Chorus/Evorus, VizWiz, and Apparition, have shown how incorporating humans into automated systems could supplement where the automatic solutions fall short. However, one unspoken bottleneck of…
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…
Smart space management can be done in many ways. On one hand, there are conversational assistants such as the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa that enable users to comfortably interact with smart spaces with only their voice, but these have…
Human-AI collaboration is on the rise with the deployment of AI-enabled intelligent assistants (e.g. Amazon Echo, Cortana, Siri, etc.) across organizational contexts. It is claimed that intelligent assistants can help people achieve more in…
Recently emerged intelligent assistants on smartphones and home electronics (e.g., Siri and Alexa) can be seen as novel hybrids of domain-specific task-oriented spoken dialogue systems and open-domain non-task-oriented ones. To realize such…
Natural language interfaces have become a common part of modern digital life. Chatbots utilize text-based conversations to communicate with users; personal assistants on smartphones such as Google Assistant take direct speech commands from…
Despite the widespread use of automatic AI translation systems in daily language tasks, professional translation remains crucial in domain-specific and high-stakes scenarios. Yet professional translators rarely rely on these systems in…
Animated avatars, which look and talk like humans, are iconic visions of the future of AI-powered systems. Through many sci-fi movies we are acquainted with the idea of speaking to such virtual personalities as if they were humans. Today,…
Conversational agents have been gaining increasing popularity in recent years. Influenced by the widespread adoption of task-oriented agents such as Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, these agents are being deployed into various applications to…
In the last decade, crowdsourcing has become a popular method for conducting quantitative empirical studies in human-machine interaction. The remote work on a given task in crowdworking settings suits the character of typical…
Conversational systems use spoken language to interact with their users. Although conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming common and afford interesting functionalities, there is little known about the issues users of…
Voice assistants have recently achieved remarkable commercial success. However, the current generation of these devices is typically capable of only reactive interactions. In other words, interactions have to be initiated by the user, which…
Voice-based systems like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, along with the growing popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, serve diverse populations, including visually impaired and low-literacy communities.…
Conversational agents are gaining popularity with the increasing ubiquity of smart devices. However, training agents in a data driven manner is challenging due to a lack of suitable corpora. This paper presents a novel method for gathering…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for…
Virtual assistants, also known as intelligent conversational systems such as Google's Virtual Assistant and Apple's Siri, interact with human-like responses to users' queries and finish specific tasks. Meanwhile, existing recommendation…
Today's conversational agents are restricted to simple standalone commands. In this paper, we present Iris, an agent that draws on human conversational strategies to combine commands, allowing it to perform more complex tasks that it has…