MCTK: a Multi-modal Conversational Troubleshooting Kit for supporting users in web applications
Giulio Antonio Abbo, Pietro Crovari, Sara Pidò, Pietro Pinoli and Franca GarzottoTL;DR
MCTK is a Python package that integrates a conversational agent with the graphical interface of a webpage. Given the user query, based on a configuration table, it returns an answer and info on how to update the interface.
Abstract
Conversational Interfaces for user assistance are becoming persuasive. Today, though, most chatbots are not integrated into the application in which they are placed, but only superimposed, with no communication between the conversational and the graphical interface. We propose Multi-modal Conversational Troubleshooting Kit (MCTK), a Python package to easily integrate a conversational agent for troubleshooting in web applications. MCTK is multi-modal: once the system recognizes the problem the user is encountering, the textual solution in the chat is coupled with visual hints in the GUI. On top of that, MCTK is easy to configure and offers separation of concerns: dialogue designers can work on the conversation without the necessity of modifying the code, and vice versa.
ACM Reference
Giulio Antonio Abbo, Pietro Crovari, Sara Pidò, Pietro Pinoli, and Franca Garzotto. 2022. MCTK: a Multi-modal Conversational Troubleshooting Kit for supporting users in web applications. In Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 55, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531073.3534480BibTeX
@inproceedings{10.1145/3531073.3534480,
author = {Abbo, Giulio Antonio and Crovari, Pietro and Pid\`{o}, Sara and Pinoli, Pietro and Garzotto, Franca},
title = {MCTK: a Multi-modal Conversational Troubleshooting Kit for supporting users in web applications},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450397193},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3531073.3534480},
doi = {10.1145/3531073.3534480},
abstract = {Conversational Interfaces for user assistance are becoming persuasive. Today, though, most chatbots are not integrated into the application in which they are placed, but only superimposed, with no communication between the conversational and the graphical interface. We propose Multi-modal Conversational Troubleshooting Kit (MCTK), a Python package to easily integrate a conversational agent for troubleshooting in web applications. MCTK is multi-modal: once the system recognizes the problem the user is encountering, the textual solution in the chat is coupled with visual hints in the GUI. On top of that, MCTK is easy to configure and offers separation of concerns: dialogue designers can work on the conversation without the necessity of modifying the code, and vice versa.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces},
articleno = {55},
numpages = {3},
location = {Frascati, Rome, Italy},
series = {AVI '22}
}