Persuading to Prepare for Quitting Smoking with a Virtual Coach: Using States and User Characteristics to Predict Behavior

Despite their prevalence in eHealth applications for behavior change, persuasive messages tend to have small effects on behavior. Conditions or states (e.g., confidence, knowledge, motivation) and characteristics (e.g., gender, age, personality) of persuadees are two promising components for more effective algorithms for choosing persuasive...

Ethics, Gender, and Agents: The Role of Designers in Conversational Agent Design

Research has shown how people anthropomorphize conversational agents (CA) and unconsciously bring their gender stereotypes into human-agent interaction. For this reason, there has been a long lasted dilemma on whether designers should design CAs that conform to or violate stereotypical expectations. Despite the urgency and importance of...

Effects of Adaptive Conversational User Interfaces on Enjoyment and Engagement while assessing Wellbeing

A decrease in wellbeing worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic called for ways to assess wellbeing in a scalable and adequate manner. Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) seem suitable, however, applying them optimally in certain contexts remains a challenge. This study aims to find ways to make CUIs more engaging and have a better experience...

A BDI-based Virtual Agent for Training Child Helpline Counsellors

Around the world, child helplines through their services provide a safe and confidential space for children to be heard and empowered. The Dutch Kindertelefoon is one of such helplines providing counselling services to children via call and chat all year round. In this thesis, we explore the design of a conversational agent for training...

Design of a conversational assistant for standardized issue description in manufacturing

This thesis describes the design and development of a conversational assistant (CA) for standardized issue descriptions in manufacturing. The CA was specifically targeted at the acquisition of data on standardized issue descriptions and at the same time reduce operator friction with the system. CAs can be used to handle and process repetitive...

An Interactive Suicide Ideation Self-Test Service for Helping People Resolve Barriers towards Contacting a Suicide Prevention Helpline

Suicide prevention is an important global topic, since suicide is being a worldwide serious health issue for decades. In the meantime, people start to pay more attention to mental health issues and Artificial Intelligence is developed and applied in many different fields. Recently, there are many studies been done on using Conversational Agents...

Experience Sharing Conversational Agent for Type II Diabetes

In this work, a conversational interaction was designed and implemented to test the effect of references to past events or shared experiences rephrased into motivational phrases within the context of working towards a diet related goal that can assist with type II diabetes over multiple sessions.<br/>Prior works that utilized a memory typically...

Studying the Anthropomorphic Visual Cues in Conversational Agents

With the increase of anthropomorphic conversational agents, the research on the effects of anthropomorphism in conversational agents is on the rise. However the studies cannot seem to agree on many of the raised questions and the research on the proper design of conversational agents is still lacking. This research paper attempted to contribute...

An Exploratory Study on Conversational Agents Using Dynamic Conversation Styles

This study aims to examine the effect of dynamically aligning the conversation style to the user’s preference in a conversational agent environment. We suggest a technique to identify the user’s preferred conversation style, by scoring statements based on their writing style. We designed a within-subject experiment intended to measure the user...

Language Inquiry for Personalized Mental Health Chatbots

Anxiety is one of the most widespread and dangerous mental health disorders in developed and underdeveoped countries, affecting a wide number of college students all over the world. If not correctly treated in time, it might procure irreparable damages in people’s life, leading to drastic consequenses such as depression and suicidal intentions....

Motivating PhD candidates with depression symptoms to complete thoughts-strengthening exercises via a conversational agent

PhD students are usually more susceptible than other people to depression-inducing situations, which are not adequately addressed in eHealth systems. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a well-established depression treatment, and one of its therapeutic methods is to change negative thought patterns into positive ones. The new positive...

The effects of Domain Expertise on A User's Conversational Search

This paper delved into the effects of domain expertise on a user's conversational search, because as the use and acceptance of voice assistants increase the need for conversational search agent that can accommodate to a human characteristic such as domain expertise. Accommodating to disadvantaged users of web search as earlier works showed that...

Bo: An intelligent network agent to promote physical activity in children with Congenital Heart Defects

There are various organisations such as the European Society of Cardiology (2012) and American Heart Association (2013), which describe why physical activity is essential for the development in youth. Unfortunately, children who have a Congenital Heart Defect (CHD), may suffer from a lack of opportunity to perform physical activity, decreasing...

Remote Work Aided by Conversational Agents

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, remote work from home has rapidly become a necessity around the world, drastically changing the potential landscape for the future of work. Over the last couple of decades, microtask crowdsourcing has emerged as a viable means of carrying out remote online work to earn one’s living — an alternative to traditional...

MANtIS: a novel information seeking dialogues dataset

Nowadays, most users access the web through search engine portals. However, information needs can often be ill-defined or too broad to be solvable by a list of results the user has to scroll through, which implies that he is most likely required to refine the need by himself to reach the desired result. In recent years, researchers have...

Embodied Conversational Agent for Mental Health Intervention

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) seek to provide a more natural means of interaction for a user through verbal and non-verbal properties of human face-to-face communication. For this reason, these systems are found to bring benefits in different mental health related interventions. However, a key challenge in developing agents to replace the...

Human Aided Bots

A chatbot is an example of a text-based conversational agent. While natural language understanding and machine learning techniques advance rapidly, current fully automated chatbots still struggle to serve their users well. Human intelligence, brought by crowd workers, freelancers or even full-time employees can be embodied in the chatbot logic...