Benjamin Cowan: „Reading a machine's mind: Partner modelling and human-agent conversation“

Voice agents have now become mainstream. It's therefore surprising how little we know about user centered issues, in particular how design guides what users actually say to these systems. These interactions fundamentally rely on a metaphor of spoken conversation, which leaves the possibility that psychological mechanisms that influence human-human dialogue are also at play in human-machine dialogue interactions. My talk will explore what informs our beliefs about machine partners’ abilities (our partner models), how these affect language production in interaction and whether we need to consider new metaphors for conversational agent interaction.