Who is Behind the Voice? User Reasoning About Agency and Capability in a Multi-Party Conversational Interface

Abstract

The potential for conversational user interfaces (CUIs) to collaborate and even lead human teams engaged in a collaborative activity remains an intriguing yet largely underexplored application of CUIs. Specifically, little seems to be understood about how people perceive such agents and their reasoning behind it. To begin to examine this intriguing topic, we performed a thematic analysis on open ended questions posed to participants after being led by either a human or CUI based leader on a collaborative task. Analysis revealed five key themes around how they perceived the leader they were interacting with: guidance, voice, understanding, timing and behaviour. These themes ultimately shaped how participants reasoned about whether the leader guiding them was a human, or autonomously controlled, highlighting key considerations designers should consider when creating such collaborative conversational agents.