Related papers: Designing for Harm Reduction: Communication Repair…
Approximately 6.2% of the world's population (466 million people) suffer from disabling hearing impairment [1]. Hearing impairment impacts negatively on one's education, financial success [2][3], cognitive development in childhood [4],…
Recommender systems have become integral to digital experiences, shaping user interactions and preferences across various platforms. Despite their widespread use, these systems often suffer from algorithmic biases that can lead to unfair…
Individuals resettled in a new environment often face challenges in accessing adequate healthcare services, particularly within the complex processes of outpatient clinic care. Cultural differences, language barriers, and low socioeconomic…
Aphasia, a language impairment primarily resulting from stroke or brain injury, profoundly disrupts communication and everyday functioning. Despite advances in speech therapy, barriers such as limited therapist availability and the scarcity…
Enhancing speech quality is an indispensable yet difficult task as it is often complicated by a range of degradation factors. In addition to additive noise, reverberation, clipping, and speech attenuation can all adversely affect speech…
Conversational repair is a mechanism used to detect and resolve miscommunication and misinformation problems when two or more agents interact. One particular and underexplored form of repair in emergent communication is the implicit repair…
Designing digital artifacts is not a linear, straightforward process. This is particularly true when applying a user-centered design approach, or co-design, with users who are unable to participate in the design process. Although the…
Limited English proficiency (LEP) patients in the U.S. face systemic barriers to healthcare beyond language and interpreter access, encompassing procedural and institutional constraints. AI advances may support communication and care…
With the rise of human-machine communication, machines are increasingly designed with humanlike characteristics, such as gender, which can inadvertently trigger cognitive biases. Many conversational agents (CAs), such as voice assistants…
Understanding the landscape of potential harms from algorithmic systems enables practitioners to better anticipate consequences of the systems they build. It also supports the prospect of incorporating controls to help minimize harms that…
Conversational AI systems exhibit a level of human-like behavior that promises to have profound impacts on many aspects of daily life -- how people access information, create content, and seek social support. Yet these models have also…
Language models encode and subsequently perpetuate harmful gendered stereotypes. Research has succeeded in mitigating some of these harms, e.g. by dissociating non-gendered terms such as occupations from gendered terms such as 'woman' and…
Conversational agents increasingly mediate everyday digital interactions, yet the effects of their communication style on user experience and task success remain unclear. Addressing this gap, we describe the results of a between-subject…
Technologies increasingly mimic human-like social behaviours. Beyond prototypical conversational agents like chatbots, this also applies to basic automated systems like app notifications or self-checkout machines that address or 'talk to'…
The use of interactive voice assistants (IVAs) in healthcare provides an avenue to address diverse health needs, such as gaps in the medical recovery period for older adult patients who have recently experienced serious illness. By using a…
Using a sample of 25,000 Bing Copilot conversations, we study how the agent responds to users of varying levels of domain expertise and the resulting impact on user experience along multiple dimensions. Our findings show that across a…
Design for Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) has become more relevant in recent years due to the enormous advances of speech technologies and their growing presence in our everyday lives. Although modern VUIs still present interaction issues,…
Robotic well-being coaches have been shown to successfully promote people's mental well-being. To provide successful coaching, a robotic coach should have the capability to repair the mistakes it makes. Past investigations of robot mistakes…
Previous work has largely considered the fairness of image captioning systems through the underspecified lens of "bias." In contrast, we present a set of techniques for measuring five types of representational harms, as well as the…
Identity, accent, style, and emotions are essential components of human speech. Voice conversion (VC) techniques process the speech signals of two input speakers and other modalities of auxiliary information such as prompts and emotion…