Artificial Spontaneity: What stand-up comedy can teach conversational agents
Participants of the Conversational Agents workshop, 2019
In 2019 I was selected to take part in a ACM CHI Workshop Conversational Agents: Acting on the Wave of Research and Development. My paper, “Lessons from Stand-up Comedy: Designing interactivity in speech interfaces,” framed findings from my PhD research for the Conversational User Interface community.
The popularity of conversational agents suggests the future of computer-generated speech lies in meeting communicative goals responsively rather than selecting between predetermined expressive settings. Orators, from stand-up comedians to politicians, deliver the same meaning to different audiences in a natural environment.
Computer science has yet to exploit the professional craft of orators who design speech that is responsive to audiences without compromising its communicative intent. By tapping into this wealth of knowledge, we can better understand strategies in successful human communication with applications including the modeling of engaging, flexible monologues in conversational agents.