Robert J. Moore

Automated Transcription and Conversation Analysis

This article explores the potential of automated transcription technology for use in Conversation Analysis (CA). First, it applies auto-transcription to a classic CA recording and compares the output with Gail Jefferson’s original transcript. Second, it applies auto-transcription to more recent recordings to demonstrate transcript quality under ideal conditions. And third, it examines the use of auto-transcripts for navigating big conversational data sets. The article concludes that although standard automated transcription technology lacks certain critical capabilities and exhibits varying levels of accuracy, it may still be useful for (a) providing first-pass transcripts, with silences, for further manual editing; and (b) scaling up data exploration and collection building by providing time-based indices requiring no manual effort to generate. Data are in American English.

A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job

Trends of independent workers, an economy of increasingly automated processes and an ethos of the peer-to-peer “sharing economy” are all coming together to transform work and employment as we know them. Emerging forms of “open” and “crowd” work are particularly keen sites for investigating how the structures and experiences of work, employment and organizations are changing. Drawing on research and design of work in organizational contexts, this paper explores how experiences with open and crowd work systems serve as sites of workplace cultural re-imagining. A marketplace, a crowdwork system and a crowdfunding experiment, all implemented within IBM, are examined as instances of new workplace configurations.

Back to the future of organizational work: crowdsourcing and digital work marketplaces

Businesses increasingly accomplish work through innovative sourcing models that leverage the crowd. As a new way of distributing work across units within an organization and as a form of outsourcing work beyond organizational boundaries, crowdwork is inherently disruptive. Crowdwork raises a number of questions about its implications to the future of organizational work, including reconfigurations to the very nature of work, consideration of the opportunities and threats to both organizational forms and worker status, and about the systems that underlie and are meant to support crowdwork. There is a need for a clear research agenda to address these challenges and to inform the design of solutions for crowdwork as it integrates with other forms of organizational work.

Conversational UX Design

From Siri to Alexa to Cortana, conversational interfaces are hitting the mainstream and becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives. However, user experiences with such applications remain disappointing. Although it is easy to get a system to produce words, none of the current agents or bots display general conversational competence. Modeling natural conversation is still a hard problem. But in order to tackle it, conversational UX designers must possess a technical understanding of the structures of natural conversation. This workshop explores the intersection of user interface design and the design of natural conversation. It seeks to outline principles and guidelines for Conversational UX Design as a distinct discipline. Workshop participants will get their hands dirty building conversation flows.

Voice-based Conversational UX Studies and Design

Voice User Interfaces are becoming ubiquitously available, providing unprecedented opportunities to advance our understanding of voice interaction in a burgeoning array of practices and settings. We invite participants to contribute work-in-progress in voice interaction, and to come together to reflect on related methodological matters, social uses, and design issues. This one-day workshop will be geared specifically to present and discuss methodologies for, and data emerging from, ongoing empirical studies of voice interfaces in use and connected emerging design insights. We seek to draw on participants (alongside organisers) contributions to explore ways of operationalising findings from such studies for the purposes of design. As part of this, will try to identify what can be done to improve user experience and consider creative approaches to how we might ameliorate challenges that are faced in the design of voice UIs.

Conversational UX Design: An Introduction

Today chat-bot or conversational-agent platforms are ubiquitous. Major technology companies, including Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, as well as multiple start-ups are providing them. But current UX design methodologies and guidelines, intended for graphical interfaces, such as web and mobile, do not apply. In conversational interfaces, the user experience is primarily in the sequences of turns of chat or voice. Although the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) provides powerful tools for analyzing bits of language, it does not provide guidance on how to string bits of language together into sequences that approximate those of natural human conversation. From the demand for applications on these platforms, a new role is emerging: the conversational UX designer. Currently, the work of conversational UX design is falling on developers, visually oriented interface designers or subject matter experts, none of whom possess the required skills for such work. Instead, what is needed is a person with both experience in UX design and a formal understanding of human conversation (social science). This book provides this new type of UX designer with a collection of studies by HCI researchers and industry practitioners that focuses on key issues in designing conversational user experiences. Each team of authors presents conversational systems and/or user studies and reflects on challenges that are unique to designing conversational interfaces. In addition, the book introduces UX designers to Conversation Analysis (CA), a field within sociology, that provides a treasure trove of empirical models of how people naturally talk and thus a scientific foundation for the creation of conversational UX patterns. General design themes in the book include: the structure of human conversation, agent knowledge, agent misunderstanding and agent design.

Adapting to Customer Initiative: Insights from Human Service Encounters

As more and more service channels migrate from “live” human providers to automated “bot” systems, there is a need to understand the interactional machinery behind human-human service encounters upon which to best design semi-automated interactions. This chapter uses conversation analysis to examine some of the interactional patterns occurring in call center service encounters that are consequential for their outcomes. We discuss how the first few turns of the interaction projects a trajectory based on how the customer adheres to or deviates from the structure of the institutional service opening. We discuss how information is interactionally structured which informs the design of more natural exchanges and unpackages collaborative understanding. Finally, we examine the call’s closing and analyze the practices of disengagement that signal customer satisfaction or discontent. The findings point to the ways that natural human service interaction practices can be applied to conversational system design at two levels: the turn level to enable appropriate next responses, and the activity level to understand the interactional trajectory.