If I Hear You Correctly: Building and Evaluating Interview Chatbots with Active Listening Skills
This work addresses the problem of creating engaging interview chatbots for users, but it is incremental as it focuses on a subset of active listening skills using existing technologies.
The researchers tackled the challenge of building effective interview chatbots that handle free-text responses by investigating the feasibility of using publicly available AI technologies to incorporate active listening skills, resulting in a prototype evaluated with 206 users across four interview topics.
Interview chatbots engage users in a text-based conversation to draw out their views and opinions. It is, however, challenging to build effective interview chatbots that can handle user free-text responses to open-ended questions and deliver engaging user experience. As the first step, we are investigating the feasibility and effectiveness of using publicly available, practical AI technologies to build effective interview chatbots. To demonstrate feasibility, we built a prototype scoped to enable interview chatbots with a subset of active listening skills - the abilities to comprehend a user's input and respond properly. To evaluate the effectiveness of our prototype, we compared the performance of interview chatbots with or without active listening skills on four common interview topics in a live evaluation with 206 users. Our work presents practical design implications for building effective interview chatbots, hybrid chatbot platforms, and empathetic chatbots beyond interview tasks.