Conversations with the News: Co-speculation into Conversational Interactions with News Content

Conversational agents have limited conversational capabilities and there is a debate as to whether interactions with conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are truly conversational. Currently, most news and journalistic content is presented in a monologic form. Simultaneously, there is an expectation that CUIs can change how we interact with news content. To explore what conversational interactions with the news could look like, two co-speculation workshops were arranged. The design-led inquiries focus on how conversations can be used as a resource for designing interactions with CUIs for news. Three different prototyping techniques were used in the design explorations: storyboarding, scripting and role-playing. Our work offers two main contributions: 1) We identify three dimensions relevant to the design space of CUI for news: the CUIs’ role, conversational capabilities, and locus of control, and 2) a critical reflection on the potential of different techniques for prototyping CUIs.