Interaction and Intelligence: Prof. Sonja Utz Discusses the Credibility of Voice Assistants at the INTERACT! Workshop

On October 24 to 25, the INTERACT! workshop took place at the Kunstmuseum Bochum, bringing together international experts to discuss interaction with intelligent systems. The title of the workshop was "Interaction with Intelligent Systems: The Significance of Scripts, Fiction, and Imagination." The focus was on ethical and philosophical questions surrounding technologies like chatbots and voice assistants.

On the second day of the event, IWM scientist Prof. Sonja Utz gave a presentation titled "Credibility of Language-Based Agents: The Influence of Social Presence and Social Roles." She shared the work of the Everyday Media research group on the credibility of ChatGPT and other voice assistants, as well as initial findings from a cross-group longitudinal study in collaboration with the Human-Machine Interaction Group. A key finding of that research: Information is perceived as more credible when it is presented in a dialogue format, which creates a sense of social presence.