Abstract
Humans and machines harmoniously collaborating and benefiting from each other is a long lasting dream for researchers in robotics and artificial intelligence. An important feature of efficient and rewarding cooperation is the ability to assume possible problematic situations and act in advance to prevent negative outcomes. This concept of assistance is known under the term proactivity. In this article, we investigate the development and implementation of proactive dialogues for fostering a trustworthy human-computer relationship and providing adequate and timely assistance. Here, we make several contributions. A formalisation of proactive dialogue in conversational assistants is provided. The formalisation forms a framework for integrating proactive dialogue in conversational applications. Additionally, we present a study showing the relations between proactive dialogue actions and several aspects of the perceived trustworthiness of a system as well as effects on the user experience. The results of the experiments provide significant contributions to the line of proactive dialogue research. Particularly, we provide insights on the effects of proactive dialogue on the human-computer trust relationship and dependencies between proactive dialogue and user specific and situational characteristics.
Highlights
2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the integration of the personal assistant Siri in Apple’s iPhone, introducing conversational user interfaces to the mainstream and paving the way for the nowadays ubiquitous smart assistant speakers, like Amazon Alexa or Google Echo
In order to provide insight into the how proactivity was modelled for our approach, we describe a formalisation of proactive dialogue
We used t-tests for the manipulation checks, a multivariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) for confounding variables, as well as a mixed ANOVA for testing the significance of developed proactive dialogue strategies
Summary
2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the integration of the personal assistant Siri in Apple’s iPhone, introducing conversational user interfaces to the mainstream and paving the way for the nowadays ubiquitous smart assistant speakers, like Amazon Alexa or Google Echo. Being able to recognise and understand user intents, such devices are able to engage in a natural language dialogue for solving tasks cooperatively with the user. In this context implies that user and system take turns during an interaction exchanging information for satisfying a specific user goal, e.g. booking a restaurant, making a purchase, or asking for the weather. In order to be accepted and trusted in these delicate domains, conversational interfaces must extend their assistance capabilities and be equipped with more human-like assistant behaviour
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