Virtual Buddy: Redefining Conversational AI Interactions for Individuals with Hand Motor Disabilities
In short
Virtual Buddy is a web app for setting up AI chat companions without all the typing. You build a companion, such as a tutor or a friend, by clicking ready-made options, save it, and come back to it whenever you like.
Why this work
Chatbots usually expect you to type out who you want them to be, and to do it again whenever you want a different kind of conversation. For people who find typing slow and tiring, that setup is the barrier.
The project began with my own wish to learn Italian. In-person lessons are hard for me to attend, and I do all my computer input with one thumb, so the constant typing made existing chatbots impractical.
What we built
Virtual Buddy keeps a set of personas. Each one has a role, a personality and needs, chosen from clickable suggestions that GPT-4 generates. You can still type your own.
Personas are saved and stay editable, so one person can keep several companions and switch between them by picking one. We left speech input out on purpose, because speech recognition can struggle with differences in accent and speech clarity.
Where it stands
This is an early proof of concept, and we have not yet evaluated it with users. Two questions shaped the design and remain open.
Ready-made options save effort, but they could narrow how much say a person has over their companion. And companions that seem very human can invite over-attachment, so Virtual Buddy is meant to add to human contact, not replace it.
Cite this paper
Atieh Taheri, Purav Bhardwaj, Arthur Caetano, Alice Zhong, and Misha Sra. 2023. Virtual Buddy: Redefining Conversational AI Interactions for Individuals with Hand Motor Disabilities. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’23 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3586182.3616680
BibTeX
@inproceedings{10.1145/3586182.3616680,
author = {Taheri, Atieh and Bhardwaj, Purav and Caetano, Arthur and Zhong,
Alice and Sra, Misha},
title = {Virtual Buddy: Redefining Conversational AI Interactions for
Individuals with Hand Motor Disabilities},
booktitle = {Adjunct Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User
Interface Software and Technology},
series = {UIST '23 Adjunct},
year = {2023},
articleno = {23},
numpages = {3},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
doi = {10.1145/3586182.3616680}
}