We are passionate about studying the design, use, and impact of AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants in work and life.
Our research at the intersection of information systems (IS) and human-computer interaction (HCI) aims to provide both theoretical contributions and useful insights for developers, managers, and policymakers.
Projects
Many chatbots are designed to look and act like humans (e.g., by giving them names and avatars). Why is that? And how do these social cues influence our interaction with chatbots? In this project, we aim to answer these questions by providing a comprehensive overview of social cues and examining their impact on human-chatbot interaction.
Current chatbots often struggle with non-routine questions and complex requests, resulting in conversational breakdowns (“Sorry, I didn´t understand that. Can you please try again?”). To address this problem, we design and evaluate more effective repair strategies (e.g., human involvement, better repair messages) and test their impact in the field with real customers.
Mental health issues, such as depression, are a large-scale problem with significant individual and socioeconomic costs. Yet, people often do not seek or receive treatment. Together with our colleagues from University of Greifswald, we design and evalute mental health chatbots and investigate how their personalization can contribute to treatment success.
Dashboards have become popular tools for visualizing, exploring, and analyzing data in business and society (e.g., COVID-19 dashboards). However, less tech-savvy users often struggle to find and extract the information they need. In our research, we address this problem by extending dashboards with a conversational user interface so that users can interact with a dashboard using natural language.
Chatbots often reach their limits in interactions with customers. However, since analyzing customer-chatbot interaction data is difficult and labor-intensive, existing limitations are not immediately apparent to both chatbot operators (e.g., customer service managers) and chatbot developers. Our research aims to address this challenge by developing novel chatbot analytics systems that can generate valuable insights for managers and developers.
Emotion-aware chatbots that can sense human emotions are becoming increasingly prevalent. In our research, we study how these chatbots can support team communication on collaboration platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Developing chatbots is often more difficult and expensive than expected. In addition, domain experts and users are not (or only partially) involved in the development process. Our research tackles this challenge by developing interactive systems that support chatbot developers to build better chatbots.
Selected Publications
(2022).
Designing Conversational Dashboards for Effective Use in Crisis Response.
Journal of the Association for Information Systems (forthcoming).
(2022).
Opposing Effects of Response Time in Human–Chatbot Interaction.
Business & Information Systems Engineering, 64, 773–791.
(2022).
Understanding the impact of control levels over emotion-aware chatbots.
Computers in Human Behavior, 129, 107122.
(2019).
A Taxonomy of Social Cues for Conversational Agents.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 132, 138–161.
Recent Publications
(2022).
Can Humanizing Voice Assistants Unleash the Potential of Voice Commerce?.
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2022).
(2022).
Exploring User Experience with a Conversational Agent to Treat Depression in Youth: A Think-Aloud Study.
Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Pre-ICIS Workshop on HCI Research in MIS.
(2022).
Knowledge Broker Bots in Enterprise Social Media: An Exploratory Study.
Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Pre-ICIS Workshop on HCI Research in MIS.
(2022).
The Impact of Conversational Assistance on the Effective Use of Forecasting Support Systems: A Framed Field Experiment.
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2022).
(2022).
Towards Designing a Conversation Mining System for Customer Service Chatbots.
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2022).
Our Partners
In our research, we collaborate with a strong network of national and international partners from academia and industry. We aim to bring together different people with different skills and expertise to engage in innovative research projects and strengthen the exchange between research and practice. Our partnerships can take various forms, including project-based collaboration, PhD scholarships, and publicly funded projects. If you would like to discuss collaboration opportunities, please get in touch with us: info@chatbotresearch.org.
Academic Partners
Industry Partners
People
Team Members @ KIT
Ulrich Gnewuch
Postdoc & Team Lead
Alexander Maedche
Professor
Ivo Benke
Postdoc & Team Lead
Marcel Ruoff
PhD Student
Daniel Schloß
PhD Student
Florian Onur Kuhlmeier
PhD Student
Saskia Haug
PhD Student
Sven Scheu
PhD Student
Associated Researchers
Stefan Morana
Saarland University
Fabian Reinkemeier
University of Göttingen
Stefan Lüttke
University of Greifswald
Alumni
Jasper Feine
Tim Rietz
Melanie Schulz
Contact
- info@chatbotresearch.org
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Human-Centered Systems Lab, Kaiserstraße 89-93, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany