Support How-To Instruction Following via Conversational Agent.

People indispensably use instructions shared by one another to work on unfamiliar tasks in daily or professional life. However, personally shared tutorials are often based on personal experiences and represent a collective overview of past encounters, which can be misaligned with the specific work context during the re-enacting time. Drawing inspiration from the effective dynamics observed in conversational instruction-giving and -following between experts and novices, we propose a chatbot system that delivers archived how-to tutorials by providing necessary information in a just-in-time manner, tailored to the needs of the instruction-follower. Our aim is to transform unaided instruction reading activities into conversational instruction-following experiences. We implemented a chatbot system and evaluated it through a between subject study. The results demonstrate a promise of leveraging human-chatbot interaction to support actionable instruction-following.