As virtual reality (VR) continues to evolve as a platform for gathering and collaboration, new forms of communication using voice and avatars are being actively studied. However, the objective and dynamic assessment of social experiences in VR remains a significant challenge, while obtrusive self-report methods prevail. This study aims to identify verbal and nonverbal behavioral indices of perceived social experience in the context of virtual conversations. In our experiment, 52 participants engaged in a ten-minute dyadic conversation in VR and rated the level of social experiences, while turn-taking patterns and behavioral (gaze, pose) data were recorded. The results indicated that rapid response time, longer speech duration, longer gaze duration during turn-taking gaps, and higher nodding frequency during turns predicted the dynamic changes in users’ social experience. By providing objective and unobtrusive measures of social interactions, this study contributes to enhancing the understanding and improvement of social VR experiences.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713674
Advancements in computational agents will enable them to act as surrogates for users in online communication, promising enhanced productivity by supporting multitasking. This capability may be especially powerful when combined with human control, allowing users to retain agency while achieving better performance than either human or agent alone. However, it remains unclear how people might leverage this technology to multitask effectively. We present a study with 18 dyads exploring how users employ automated responses to support an arithmetic task while staying engaged in a voice call. Participants multitasked with a conversational agent under three levels of autonomy: none, shared, and full. Our findings indicate that fully automated systems can maintain conversational engagement, enabling users to multitask effectively. Surprisingly, shared autonomy hindered this ability. Based on our results, we discuss implications for designing shared autonomy in conversations, highlighting new considerations and challenges.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714017
Online debates can enhance critical thinking but may escalate into hostile attacks. As humans are increasingly reliant on Generative AI (GenAI) in writing tasks, we need to understand how people utilize GenAI in online debates. To examine the patterns of writing behavior while making arguments with GenAI, we created an online forum for soccer fans to engage in turn-based and free debates in a post format with the assistance of ChatGPT, arguing on the topic of "Messi vs Ronaldo". After 13 sessions of two-part study and semi-structured interviews with 39 participants, we conducted content and thematic analyses to integrate insights from interview transcripts, ChatGPT records, and forum posts. We found that participants prompted ChatGPT for aggressive responses, created posts with similar content and logical fallacies, and sacrificed the use of ChatGPT for better human-human communication. This work uncovers how polarized forum members work with GenAI to engage in debates online.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713829
AI agents are increasingly tasked with making proactive suggestions in online spaces where groups collaborate, yet risk being unhelpful or even annoying if they fail to match group preferences or behave in socially inappropriate ways. Fortunately, group spaces have a rich history of prior interactions and affordances for social feedback that can support grounding an agent's generations to a group's interests and norms. We present Social-RAG, a workflow for socially grounding agents that retrieves context from prior group interactions, selects relevant social signals, and feeds them into a language model to generate messages in a socially aligned manner. We implement this in \textsc{PaperPing}, a system for posting paper recommendations in group chat, leveraging social signals determined from formative studies with 39 researchers. From a three-month deployment in 18 channels reaching 500+ researchers, we observed PaperPing posted relevant messages in groups without disrupting their existing social practices, fostering group common ground.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713749
Effective communication is crucial for meeting security needs, yet gender-related communication challenges faced by women security experts within software development remain underexplored. In an interview study with 25 women security experts, we investigated gender-related communication challenges hindering the adoption of security requirements, and strategies to overcome these. Key challenges included the undervaluation of women’s security expertise, communication barriers, resistance to women’s security-related suggestions, and instances of hostility. Communication challenges with stakeholders who were men disrupted team collaboration, resulting in delays, weakened security measures, and increased organizational risk. Consequently, women security experts often had to adopt strategies, such as leveraging allied men and overpreparing, to assert their security competence. We further offer insights into women’s participation in security studies. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations on how to address gender-related challenges.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713943
Voice agents can construct meaningful conversations with older adults to offer various benefits, such as providing emotional companionship and assisting with memory recall. However, such conversations often follow the simple turn-taking pattern and lack interruption and backchannel of natural human conversation. Previous research has shown that this rigid turn-taking pattern lacks interactivity and initiative, limiting the flexible communication between older adults and voice agents. To address these issues and create a more natural conversational voice agent, we first conducted a formative study to identify common usage of interruption in the natural conversations of older adults. We then designed an LLM-powered Barge-in agent that supports interruption and backchannel. Our within-subject exploratory study showed that participants felt that conversations with Barge-in agents were more natural, engaging, and fluent than with the No barge-in agent. We further present design implications for creating more natural and human-like voice agents for older adults.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714228
As computer-mediated communication tools have evolved from beepers to 2G cell phones, and now to today's smartphones, people have consistently embraced these technologies to maintain relationships and enhance the convenience of their daily lives. However, while contemporary communication technologies clearly diverge from their traditional roles, few studies have critically examined their effects, particularly in relation to communication quality and relationships. To address what contemporary technologies may have overlooked, our study revisits retro communication technologies—specifically, the beeper. We recreated the beeper experience through BeeperRedux, a mobile application, and conducted a two-week deployment study involving ten groups. Our findings highlight three valuable aspects of retro communication technologies: fostering sincerity, restoring recipients' autonomy over their communication, and prioritizing offline engagement. In the discussion, we present design guidelines for improving technology-mediated communication and offer methodological reflections on recreating obsolete technology to empirically explore past experiences.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713568