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Alexa as an Active Listener: How Backchanneling Can Elicit Self-Disclosure and Promote User Experience by Eugene Cho; Nasim Motalebi; S. Shyam Sundar; Saeed Abdullah is a Computer Science article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Alexa as an Active Listener: How Backchanneling Can Elicit Self-Disclosure and Promote User Experience about?

Active listening is a well-known skill applied in human communication to build intimacy and elicit self-disclosure to support a wide variety of cooperative tasks. When applied to conversational UIs, active listening from machines can also elicit greater self-disclosure by signaling to the users that they are being heard, which can have positive outcomes. However, it takes considerable engineering effort and training to embed active listening skills in machines at scale, given the need to personalize active-listening cues to individual users and their specific utterances. A more generic solution is needed given the increasing use of conversational agents, especially by the growing number of socially isolated individuals. With this in mind, we developed an Amazon Alexa skill that provides privacy-preserving and pseudo-random backchanneling to indicate active listening. User study (N = 40) data show that backchanneling improves perceived degree of active listening by smart speakers. It also results in more emotional disclosure, with participants using more positive words. Perception of smart speakers as active listeners is positively associated with perceived emotional support. Interv

Who reads Alexa as an Active Listener: How Backchanneling Can Elicit Self-Disclosure and Promote User Experience?

Author

Eugene Cho; Nasim Motalebi; S. Shyam Sundar; Saeed Abdullah

Publisher

ACM

Published

2022

Language

EN

Field

Computer Science (Physical Sciences)