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Language technologies have a racial bias, committing greater errors for Black users than for white users. However, little work has evaluated what effect these disparate error rates have on users themselves. The present study aims to…
Many educational technologies use artificial intelligence (AI) that presents generated or produced language to the learner. We contend that all language, including all AI communication, encodes information about the identity of the human or…
Studies on bias in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tend to focus on reporting error rates for speakers of underrepresented dialects, yet less research examines the human side of system bias: how do system failures shape users' lived…
As conversational AI systems increasingly permeate the socio-emotional realms of human life, they bring both benefits and risks to individuals and society. Despite extensive research on detecting and categorizing harms in AI systems, less…
Voice assistants (VAs) are becoming a feature of our everyday life. Yet, the user experience (UX) is often limited, leading to underuse, disengagement, and abandonment. Co-designing interactions for VAs with potential end-users can be…
A key concern with the concept of "alignment" is the implicit question of "alignment to what?". AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally,…
Recent advances in the capacity of large language models to generate human-like text have resulted in their increased adoption in user-facing settings. In parallel, these improvements have prompted a heated discourse around the risks of…
Despite huge gains in performance in natural language understanding via large language models in recent years, voice assistants still often fail to meet user expectations. In this study, we conducted a mixed-methods analysis of how voice…
We take a critical lens toward the pursuit of racially inclusive language technologies and identify several areas necessitating future work. We discuss the potential harms of conversational technologies, outline three challenges that arise…
Language model deployments in consumer-facing applications introduce numerous risks. While existing research on harms and hazards of such applications follows top-down approaches derived from regulatory frameworks and theoretical analyses,…
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in various domains. However, these advancements have also introduced additional safety risks and raised concerns regarding their detrimental impact on…
Spoken dialogue systems have transformed human-machine interaction by providing real-time responses to queries. However, misunderstandings between the user and system persist. This study explores the significance of interactional language…
Recently, a lot of works show promising directions for audio design in augmented reality (AR). These works are mainly focused on how to improve user experience and make AR more realistic. But even though these improvements seem promising,…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare, enabling fast development of tools like stress monitors, wellness trackers, and mental health chatbots. However, rapid and low-barrier development can introduce risks of bias,…
Modern multilingual models are trained on concatenated text from multiple languages in hopes of conferring benefits to each (positive transfer), with the most pronounced benefits accruing to low-resource languages. However, recent work has…
Emotions that are perceived as "negative" are inherent in the human experience. Yet not much work in the field of HCI has looked into the role of these emotions in interaction with technology. As technology is becoming more social, personal…
Automated dialogue or conversational systems are anthropomorphised by developers and personified by users. While a degree of anthropomorphism may be inevitable due to the choice of medium, conscious and unconscious design choices can guide…
Gender is widely discussed in the context of language tasks and when examining the stereotypes propagated by language models. However, current discussions primarily treat gender as binary, which can perpetuate harms such as the cyclical…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for text generation tasks from everyday use to high-stakes enterprise and government applications, including simulated interviews with asylum seekers. While many works highlight the new…
Technology companies have produced varied responses to concerns about the effects of the design of their conversational AI systems. Some have claimed that their voice assistants are in fact not gendered or human-like -- despite design…