Designing Conversational User Interfaces for Older Adults

We are concurrently witnessing two significant shifts: voice and chat-based conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are becoming ubiquitous, and older people are becoming a very large demographic group. However, despite the recent increase in research activity within fields such as CUI, older adults continue to be underrepresented as CUI users both in research and in the design of commercial products. Therefore, the overarching aim of this workshop is to increase the momentum for research that centers on older adults as CUI users. For this, we plan to create an interdisciplinary space that brings together researchers, designers, practitioners, and users, to discuss and share challenges, principles, and strategies for designing CUIs for the ageing population. We thus welcome contributions of empirical studies, theories, design, and evaluation of CUIs for older adults. Through this, we aim to grow the community of CUI researchers across disciplinary boundaries (human-computer interaction, voice and language technologies, geronto-technologies, information studies, etc.) that are engaged in the shared goal of ensuring that older adults are not marginalized or excluded from the design of CUIs.