Shiyoh Goetsu

Li Siyan, Kai-Hui Liang, Shopnil Shahriar et al.

Current dialogue systems, powered by large language models, often treat empathy as essential without assessing its true impact, especially in behavior change, where motivation and adherence often depend on subtle user-chatbot dynamics. We examine this assumption by building three WhatsApp physical-activity (PA) coaching chatbots that differ only in empathy level and evaluating them in a six-week within-subject study (N = 13). Participants struggled to distinguish between the empathy conditions, and the non-empathetic version was often rated as more engaging and useful. However, higher-empathy variants were still associated with a larger overall average increase in step counts and faster improvement in intention to follow advice. These results suggest empathy's role is nuanced: it may be hard for lay users to identify explicitly, but it can still shape motivation and trust that support sustained change. We interpret this pattern through the Elaboration Likelihood Model's peripheral route. We highlight design implications for building next-generation PA coaching chatbots that balance effectiveness with human-like connection.

Shiyoh Goetsu, Tetsuya Sakai

We report on an investigation into how different types of failures in a voice user interface (VUI) affects user frustration. To this end, we conducted a pilot user study ($n=10$) and a main user study ($n=30$), both with a simple voice-operated calendar application that we built using the Alexa Skills Kit. In our pilot study, we identified three major failure types as perceived by the users, namely, Reason Unknown, Speech Misrecognition, and Utterance Pattern Match Failure, along with more fine-grained failure types from the developer's viewpoint such as Intent Pattern Match Failure and Intent Misclassification. Then, in our main study, we set up three user tasks that were designed to each induce a specific failure type, and collected user frustration ratings for each task. Our main findings are: (a)Users may be relatively tolerant to user-perceived Speech Misrecognition, and not so to user-perceived Reason Unknown and Utterance Mattern Match Failures; (b)Regarding the relationship between developer-perceived and user-perceived failure types, 68.8\% of developer-perceived Intent Misclassification instances caused user-perceived Reason Unkown failures. From (a) and (b), a practical design implication would be to try to prevent Intent Misclassification from happening by carefully crafting the utterance patterns for each intent.