Abstract
On-demand emotional support is an expensive and elusive societal need that is exacerbated in difficult times — as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior work in affective crowdsourcing has examined ways to overcome technical challenges for providing on-demand emotional support to end users. This can be achieved by training crowd workers to provide thoughtful and engaging on-demand emotional support. Inspired by recent advances in conversational user interface research, we investigate the efficacy of a conversational user interface for training workers to deliver psychological support to users in need. To this end, we conducted a between-subjects experimental study on Prolific, wherein a group of workers (N=200) received training on motivational interviewing via either a conversational interface or a conventional web interface. Our results indicate that training workers in a conversational interface yields both better worker performance and improves their user experience in on-demand stress management tasks.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence |
| Publisher | Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) |
| Pages | 3-12 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Oct 2020 |