How do system and user characteristics, along with anthropomorphism, impact cognitive absorption of chatbots – Introducing SUCCAST through a mixed methods study

Chatbots are radically redefining the customer service landscape. With the advent of AI-enabled chatbots, like ChatGPT, organizations are adopting chatbots to provide better customer services; however, the user experience has been given less attention. Building on IS success model and cognitive absorption theory, we posit that system and user...

ContextBot: Improving Response Consistency in Crowd-Powered Conversational Systems for Affective Support Tasks

Crowd-powered conversational systems (CPCS) solicit the wisdom of crowds to quickly respond to on-demand users' needs. The very factors that make this a viable solution - -such as the availability of diverse crowd workers on-demand - - also lead to great challenges. The ever-changing pool of online workers powering conversations with...

Software Bots in Software Engineering: Benefits and Challenges

Software bots are becoming increasingly popular in software engineering (SE). In this tutorial, we define what a bot is and present several examples. We also discuss the many benefits bots provide to the SE community, including helping in development tasks (such as pull request review and integration) and onboarding newcomers to a project....

Considering patient safety in autonomous e-mental health systems - Detecting risk situations and referring patients back to human care

Background: Digital health interventions can fill gaps in mental healthcare provision. However, autonomous e-mental health (AEMH) systems also present challenges for effective risk management. To balance autonomy and safety, AEMH systems need to detect risk situations and act on these appropriately. One option is sending automatic alerts to...

Chatterbox: Conversational Interfaces for Microtask Crowdsourcing

Conversational interfaces can facilitate human-computer interactions. Whether or not conversational interfaces can improve worker experience and work quality in crowdsourcing marketplaces has remained unanswered. We investigate the suitability of text-based conversational interfaces for microtask crowdsourcing. We designed a rigorous...