Ulrich Gnewuch

University of Passau

Conversational agents (CAs) are software-based systems designed to interact with humans using natural language and have attracted considerable research interest in recent years. Following the Computers Are Social Actors paradigm, many studies have shown that humans react socially to CAs when they display social cues such as small talk, gender, age,...

Research has shown that employing social cues (e.g., name, human-like avatar) in chatbot design enhances users’ social presence perceptions and their chatbot usage intentions. However, the picture is less clear for the social cue of chatbot response time. While some researchers argue that instant responses make chatbots appear unhuman-like, others...

Governments and health organizations increasingly use dashboards to provide real-time information during natural disasters and pandemics. Although these dashboards aim to make crisis-related information accessible to the general public, the average user can have a hard time interacting with them and finding the information needed to make everyday d...

To leverage the complementary strengths of humans and artificial intelligence (AI) in online service encounters, firms have begun to use hybrid service agents: combinations of AI agents (e.g., chatbots) and human agents (e.g., service employees) behind a single interface. However, it is unclear whether firms should be transparent about behind-the-s...

Advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence are paving the way for retailers to employ physical robots in assisting consumers with their purchase decisions. However, as research has primarily focused on virtual robots (e.g., chatbots) or relied on hypothetical scenarios without actual consumer-robot interaction, our understanding of how co...

Open data is widely recognized for its potential positive impact on society and economy. However, many open data sets remain underutilized because users, such as civil servants and citizens, lack the necessary technical and analytical skills. Additionally, existing open data portals often fall short of providing user-friendly access to data. Althou...

Large language models (LLMs) have generated excitement in many areas and may also make human-like conversations with social robots possible. Drawing from human-robot interaction literature and interviews, we developed Saleshat based on the commercial social robot Furhat and the large language model GPT-4. Saleshat emphasizes refined natural languag...

A new generation of information systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the way we work. However, existing research on human-AI collaboration is scattered across disciplines, highlighting the need for more transparency about the design of human-AI collaboration in organizational contexts. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing...

Current customer service chatbots often struggle to meet customer expectations. One reason is that despite advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities of chatbots are often far from perfect. In order to improve them, chatbot managers need to make informed decisions and continuously adapt the chatb...

Design knowledge has become increasingly important in information systems research in recent years, with Design Science Research (DSR) as an approach to developing innovative and effective artifacts. Design Principles (DPs) have proven to be a popular tool for contributing to abstract design knowledge. The construction and formulation of DPs has be...

Chatbots bieten große Potenziale, Kunden mit geringem Aufwand Informationen bereitzustellen und manuelle Prozessschritte zu automatisieren. Gleichzeitig gibt es aber auch Ernüchterung um die Technologie und es entstehen Akzeptanzprobleme, wenn Kunden mit Chatbots schlechte Erfahrungen machen. Da Chatbots nicht das ganze Repertoire abbilden können,...

As chatbots are gaining popularity in customer service, it is critically important for companies to continuously analyze and improve their chatbots' performance. However, current analysis approaches are often limited to the question-answer level or produce highly aggregated metrics (e.g., conversations per day) instead of leveraging the full potent...

Forecasting support systems (FSSs) support demand planners in important forecasting decisions by offering statistical forecasts. However, planners often rely on their judgment more than on system-based advice which can be detrimental to forecast accuracy. This is caused by a lack of understanding and subsequent lack of trust in the FSS and its advi...

Conversational agents are a promising digital health intervention that can mitigate help-seeking barriers for youth with depression to receive treatment. Although studies have shown sufficient acceptance, feasibility, and promising effectiveness for adults, not much is known about how youth experience interacting with conversational agents to impro...

Enterprise social media (ESM) platforms are a central hub for team collaboration. While they can effectively facilitate communication among distributed individuals and teams, promoting knowledge sharing remains a major challenge. ESM users are often unaware of others’ knowledge and therefore are unable to seek experts or share knowledge with those...

Chatbots are increasingly used to provide customer service. However, despite technological advances, customer service chatbots frequently reach their limits in customer interactions. This is not immediately apparent to both chatbot operators (e.g., customer service managers) and chatbot developers because analyzing conversational data is difficult...

Voice commerce allows customers to carry out sales dialogues with voice assistants (VAs) through natural spoken language. However, its adoption remains limited. To help determine how to overcome existing barriers to adoption, we conducted a series of three empirical pre-studies and a laboratory experiment (N = 323) investigating the role of VAs' hu...

Chatbots are omnipresent in today’s online environments in work and private life. While early chatbots were easy to identify, recently released open-domain chatbots, such as GPT3 and Blenderbot2, increasingly blur the line between human and chatbot interaction. Dedicated research is required to better understand how different design configurations...

Conversational breakdowns often force users to go through frustrating loops of trial and error when trying to get answers from chatbots. Although research has emphasized the potential of conversational repair strategies in helping users resolve breakdowns, design knowledge for implementing such strategies is scarce. To address this challenge, we ar...

Millions of people experience mental health issues each year, increasing the necessity for health-related services. One emerging technology with the potential to help address the resulting shortage in health care providers and other barriers to treatment access are conversational agents (CAs). CAs are software-based systems designed to interact wit...

Solving real-world problems with innovative and novel artifacts is at the core of design science research (DSR). Given DSR’s emphasis on a strong connection to the real-world, artifacts for solving a particular problem may not only be described in extant literature, but also exist in practice. This is particularly the case for software artifacts. T...

Depression is a large-scale and consequential problem in youth and young adults. Conversational agents (CAs) can contribute to addressing current barriers to seeking treatment, such as long waiting lists, and reduce the high dropout rates reported for other digital health interventions. However, existing CAs have not considered differences between...

Despite the ubiquity of voice assistants (VAs), they see limited adoption in the form of voice commerce, an online sales channel using natural language. A key barrier to the widespread use of voice commerce is the lack of user trust. To address this problem, we draw on similarity-attraction theory to investigate how trust is affected when VAs match...

More and more companies are using chatbots in customer service. The large number of chatbots and their interactions with customers produce a huge amount of data, which is useful to track the usage and performance of the chatbot. However, many established performance metrics (e.g., intent scores, conversations per day) could be considered too intuit...

Organizations increasingly use software robots, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots, to automate tasks previously performed by human employees. While previous research has predominantly focused on technical challenges and organizational outcomes of software robot implementation, less attention has been paid to how employees respon...

Emotion-aware chatbots that can sense human emotions are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, the exposition of emotions by emotion-aware chatbots undermines human autonomy and users' trust. One way to ensure autonomy is through the provision of control. Offering too much control, in turn, may increase users’ cognitive effort. To investigate t...

Conversational agents (CAs)—software systems emulating conversations with humans through natural language—reshape our communication environment. As CAs have been widely used for applications requiring human-like interactions, a key goal in information systems (IS) research and practice is to be able to create CAs that exhibit a particular personali...

Dashboards are increasingly used by governments and health organizations to provide important information to the general public during a crisis. However, in contrast to organizational settings, the majority of the general population has not or rarely used dashboards before and therefore often struggles to interact effectively with these dashboards....

Teams are crucial for organizations in making data-driven decisions. However, current business intelligence & analytics (BI&A) systems are primarily designed to support individuals and, therefore, cannot be used effectively in co-located team interactions. To address this challenge, we conduct a design science research (DSR) project to design a mul...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies enable conversational agents (CAs) to perform highly complex tasks in a human-like manner. For example, CAs may help people cope with anxiety and thus can improve mental health and well-being. In order to achieve this and support patients in an authentic way, it is needed to imbue CAs with human-like behavi...

Robo-advisors promise to offer professional financial advice to private households at low cost. However, the automation of financial advisory processes to fully-digitalized services often goes hand in hand with a loss of human contact and lack of trust. Especially in an investment context, customers demand a human involved to ensure the trustworthi...

Recent years have seen increased interest in the application of chatbots for conversational commerce. However, many chatbots are falling short of their expectations because customers are reluctant to disclose personal information to them (e.g., product interest, email address). Drawing on social response theory and similarity-attraction theory, we...

Chatbots sind softwarebasierte Systeme, die mittels natürlicher Sprache mit Menschen interagieren. Viele Unternehmen setzen zunehmend auf Chatbots, um Kunden bei der Suche nach Informationen über Produkte oder Dienstleistungen und bei der Durchführung einfacher Prozesse zu unterstützen. Nichtsdestotrotz ist die Akzeptanz von Chatbots bei vielen Nut...

A recent UNESCO report reveals that most popular voice-based conversational agents are designed to be female. In addition, it outlines the potentially harmful effects this can have on society. However, the report focuses primarily on voice-based conversational agents and the analysis did not include chatbots (i.e., text-based conversational agents)...

Chatbots are software-based systems designed to interact with humans using text-based natural language and have attracted considerable interest in online service encounters. In this context, service providers face the challenge of measuring chatbot service encounter satisfaction (CSES), as most approaches are limited to post-interaction surveys tha...

Chatbots have attracted considerable interest in recent years. A key design challenge to increase their adoption is to make the interaction with them feel natural and human-like. Therefore, it is suggested to incorporate social cues in the chatbot design. Drawing on the Computers are Social Actors paradigm and the "uncanny valley" hypothesis, we st...

A key challenge in designing conversational user interfaces is to make the conversation between the user and the system feel natural and human-like. In order to increase perceived humanness, many systems with conversational user interfaces (e.g., chatbots) use response delays to simu-late the time it would take humans to respond to a message. Howev...

Reducing and shifting energy consumption could contribute significantly to a more sustainable use of energy in households. Studies have shown that the provision of feedback can encourage consumers to use energy more sustainably. While there is wide variety of energy feedback solutions ranging from in-home displays to mobile applications, there is a...

The idea of interacting with computers through natural language dates back to the 1960s, but recent technological advances have led to a renewed interest in conversational agents such as chatbots or digital assistants. In the customer service context, conversational agents promise to create a fast, convenient, and cost-effective channel for communi...

In the past, gamification studies revealed that one-size-fits all solutions are not sufficient for successfully addressing every human being. Thus, empirical investigations are necessary, examining inter-personal varying effects of gamification that is adapted to the users. The proposed experimental design describes the investigation of moderating...

Nutzerassistenz unterstützt Anwender dabei, ihre Aufgaben unter Verwendung von Informationstechnologie besser auszuführen. In der Vergangenheit haben sich Assistenzfunktionen im Wesentlichen auf die von Anwendern explizit eingeforderten textuellen Hilfefunktionen beschränkt. Die rasante Entwicklung der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie bi...

Enterprise systems must be used effectively to maximize their benefits. Given their complexity and integration of standard business processes, they pose significant challenges for employees’ learning. Users need to learn how to access a system and its data and how to leverage the information it provides to perform their daily tasks effectively. Bas...