Conversation is one of the primary methods of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), with research at HRI covering many aspects of this interaction technique from how it differs or imitates human-human communication, through how to leverage everyday communication to improve interactions with a diverse set of users and settings, to how people interact with conversational robots in their everyday lives.

In parallel, research specifically into Conversational User Interaction (CUI) has been increasing with the 5th annual ACM CUI taking place in 2023. In this venue there are similar examples of exploring the differences and similarities to human-human communication, taking advantage of learning from analysing human interaction to improve CUIs, and how people interact with conversational user interfaces on a day to day basis, as well as those embodied in robots. A shared interest for CUI and HRI researchers is the embodied nature of conversations, i.e., gestures, gaze, and other multimodal cues, that are performed as bodies (artificial or not) during communication, whether the embodiment is presented as a smart speaker or a humanoid robot.

This workshop thus looks to gather researchers, designers and practitioners from the range of disciplines that intersect on Human-Robot-Conversational Interaction (HRCI) to discuss and coordinate this cutting edge research and develop a truly multi-disciplinary HRCI community. We aim to bring together some of the leading researchers in these fields, with an interest in CUI based HRI questions to map the work needed to develop the thematic grand challenges identified by recent CUI and HRI work.

This workshop will be critical to the direction of both fields with goals to (a) Identify key themes and areas of overlap in current literature and practice (b) Discuss the strategies, methods and approaches appropriate to address these themes, and (c) Explore the potential impact of addressing these challenges for both fields.

Please see our Call for Papers page for details about submitting to the workshop.