Speculating About Multi-user Conversational Interfaces and LLMs: What If Chating Wasn’t So Lonely?
by: Seymour, W. and Rader, E.
Abstract
The advent of LLMs means that CUIs are cool again, but what isn’t so cool is that we’re doomed to use them alone. The one user, one account, one device paradigm has dominated the design of CUIs and is not going away as new conversational technologies emerge. In this provocation we explore some of the technical, legal, and design difficulties that seem to make multi-user CUIs so difficult to implement. Drawing inspiration from the ways that people manage messy group discussions, such as parliamentary and consensus-based paradigms, we show how LLM-based CUIs might be well suited to bridging the gap. With any luck, this might even result in everyone having to sit through fewer poorly run meetings and agonising group discussions—truly a laudable goal!
Reference
Seymour, W. and Rader, E.. “Speculating About Multi-user Conversational Interfaces and LLMs: What If Chating Wasn’t So Lonely?.” Poster in Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces.2024.
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