Comparison of Crowdsourced and Remote Subjective User Studies: A Case Study of Investigative Child Interviews

Abstract

Crowdsourced and remote user studies have recently gained popularity as alternatives to traditional laboratory studies. However, they are subject to unreliability, and it is challenging to ensure that valid results are collected, especially when conducting user studies with experts. Experts are a sparse resource, usually having busy schedules and heavy workloads, and are not necessarily geographically close. They are therefore often unwilling to participate in studies which require physical attendance. In this paper, we compare three alternative methods: crowd sourced user study with non-experts, remote user study with non-experts, and remote user study with domain experts, for a use case involving investigative child interview training. We present the results from three subjective studies about the perception of AI-generated child avatars, which is developed using various technologies such as dialogue models, game engine, text-to-speech and speech-to-text components. The study was conducted with three different user groups, and our results indicate the importance of using best practice measures for ensuring the collection of reliable results in crowdsourced settings as compared to remote studies, and highlight the difference between the perspectives of domain experts and non-experts.