- Previous work addressed the problem of ubiquitous and opportunistic microtask crowdsourcing through user interfaces for mobile devices, either in humanitarian or academic setting.
- While the specific work of the researchers addresses a different class of interaction systems (chatbots vs. native or web-based mobile interface), the systems mentioned in this study (including mCrowd, MobileWorks, etc.) share the same ambition and vision for democratization and scaling up of crowd work.
- The results obtained by their analysis of mobile task types and designs features some interesting commonalities and differences with the findings discussed later.

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- Conversational agent definition: a software programmed to automatically interpret and respond to requests expressed in natural language, so to mimic the behavior of a human interlocutor.
- Chatbots definition: a class of conversational agents that prevalently use text as an interaction medium.
- While research on chatbot systems dates back to the 1960s, the growing popularity of messaging platforms has sparked new interest both in industry and academia.

Chatterbox: Background and Related Work

Mavridis, P., Huang, O., Qiu, S.. Gadiraju, U., & Bozzon, A. (2019) Chatterbox: conversational interfaces for microtask crowdsourcing. Association for Computing Machinery, 243–251. DOI:https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/10.1145/3320435.3320439

Chatterbox: conversational interfaces for microtask crowdsourcing

- Research in microtask crowdsourcing addressed the integration of crowd work platforms with text-messaging and chatbot systems, to either train the machine learning components of the conversational agent, or substitute artificial intelligence for conversation management purposes.
- An early example of the chat-based crowdsourcing system is Guardian, a semi-automated chat system that helps wrapping up Web-ABIs into spoken dialogue systems. 
- The same authors of Guardian proposed Chorus, a system that allowed end-users to chat directly with crowd workers, who would then propose and vote on candidate responses.
- Evorus is an evolution of Chorus, where conversation automation is obtained by adding, learning, and improving automated responses using past information gained from the crowd.
- These systems demonstrated the technical feasibility of application-specific microtask execution through chatbots.

Chatterbox: Crowd-Powered Conversational Systems

Chatterbox: Mobile Interfaces for Crowdsourcing

- Some researchers noted that microtask marketplaces were often inaccessible to workers in developing countries, and introduced a mobile-based crowdsourcing platform called MobileWorks for OCR tasks, thereby lowering the barriers for participation.
- Other researchers study usability barriers that were prevalent on AMT which prevented workers with little digital literacy skills from participating and completing works, showing that task instructions, user interface, and the workers’ cultural context corresponded to key usability barriers.
- To overcome these barriers and enable better access and participation, authors proposed the use of simplified user interfaces, simplified task instructions, and language localization.
- Complimenting these prior works, the authors of this study proposed that using conventional interfaces that people may be more familiar with as an alternative to standard web interfaces lowers participation barriers.

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