Embrace your incompetence! Designing appropriate CUI communication through an ecological approach

TL;DR

This paper advocates for ecologically grounded design in CUIs, encouraging them to express uncertainty and embarrassment to improve communication authenticity without sacrificing naturalness.

Contribution

It introduces an ecological approach to CUI design, emphasizing the use of appropriate cues like uncertainty and embarrassment to enhance communication realism.

Findings

CUIs can improve communication by expressing uncertainty.

Ecologically valid cues enhance user trust and understanding.

Designing for incompetence can make CUIs more relatable.

Abstract

People form impressions of their dialogue partners, be they other people or machines, based on cues drawn from their communicative style. Recent work has suggested that the gulf between people's expectations and the reality of CUI interaction widens when these impressions are misaligned with the actual capabilities of conversational user interfaces (CUIs). This has led some to rally against a perceived overriding concern for naturalness, calling instead for more representative, or appropriate communicative cues. Indeed, some have argued for a move away from naturalness as a goal for CUI design and communication. We contend that naturalness need not be abandoned, if we instead aim for ecologically grounded design. We also suggest a way this might be achieved and call on CUI designers to embrace incompetence! By letting CUIs express uncertainty and embarrassment through ecologically valid and appropriate cues that are ubiquitous in human communication - CUI designers can achieve more appropriate communication without turning away from naturalness entirely.