A Design Space for Intelligent Dialogue Augmentation

DOI

The use of intelligent agents in communication is a growing trend aimed at enhancing the efficiency and quality of interactions. As such, \emph{dialogue augmentation systems}---text processing systems that interactively enhance ongoing written or spoken communication---are gaining significant popularity across domains. While technical limitations had previously inhibited their real-time usage for effective communication augmentation, recent developments in language processing have improved their capabilities to contribute to dialogue as intelligent, emancipated, and proactive agents. While other works on dialogue augmentation focus on evaluating design considerations for specific applications of these systems, we lack a unified understanding of the broader design principles that apply to dialogue more generally. Through a literature review and mixed-methods analysis of 78 existing systems, we iteratively define a comprehensive design space for intelligent dialogue augmentation systems. To further ground our analysis, we interweave Clark's models of dialogue with concepts in human-AI collaboration and discuss trends in the evolving role of dialogue augmentation systems along five dimensions---dialogue context, augmentation context, task, interaction, and model. Based on the identified trends, we discuss concrete challenges for broader adoption, highlighting the need to design \emph{trusted}, \emph{seamless}, \emph{timely}, and \emph{accessible} augmentations. The design space contributes as a mechanism for researchers to facilitate defining design choices during development, situate their systems in the current landscape of works, and understand opportunities for future research.