Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field.

Despite the growing interest in Intelligent Personal Assistants in many domains, limited studies have explored this technology's usage among persons with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) and its potential for improving their cognitive skills. This paper presents an exploratory study that investigated the use of Google Home featured with Google Assistant in a therapeutic setting. We provided three therapists with two Google Home devices for 21 days, and they were welcome to use it as they liked at their ordinary oneto-one therapy sessions. During the study, we gathered diferent data: history logs from Google Assistant and semi-structured observations and comments by the specialists through questionnaires, forms, and a group interview. Our fndings give a frst glimpse of the usage patterns of Google Assistant within the therapy for children with NDD. Furthermore, our results point out the benefts and challenges for both therapists and children while interacting with conversational technology. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; • Social and professional topics → People with disabilities.

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Our research aims at exploiting the advances in conversational technology to support people with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). NDD is a group of conditions that are characterized by severe deficits in the cognitive, emotional and motor areas and produce severe impairments in communication and social functioning. This paper presents the design, technology and exploratory evaluation of Emoty, a spoken Conversational Agent (CA) created specifically for individuals with NDD. The goal of Emoty is to help these persons enhancing communication abilities related to emotional recognition and expression, which are fundamental in any form of human relationship. The system exploits emotion detection capabilities based on the semantics of the speech by calling the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer API and from the harmonic features of the audio thanks to an "all-of-us" Deep Learning model. The design and evaluation of Emoty are based on the close collaboration among computer engineers and specialists in NDD

The fundamentals of verbal communication skills are developed during childhood, and existing studies pinpoint the benefits of stimulating language and expression skills from an early age. Our research is a preliminary evaluation of conversational technology to support this process. In this paper, we describe the design process of a speech-based conversational agent for children, which involved a Wizard-of-Oz empirical study with 20 primary school children aged 9-10 y.o. in order to identify the design guidelines for the automated version of the system. Our agent is called ISI, is integrated into a web application and exploits oral and visual interaction modes. ISI enables children to practice verbal skills related to the description of a person's physical characteristics. It provides opportunities for them to learn and use words and linguistic constructs. Also, ISI permits to develop their body awareness and selfexpression (when describing their self) or the attention to "the other" (when describing someone else). ISI engages users in a speech-based conversational flow composed of two main repeated steps. It talks to the children and stimulates them with questions about a specific part of their body (e.g., "What color is your hair?"). When the users describe the required feature adequately, ISI provides a cheerful real-time visual representation of the answer; otherwise, it provides hints.