User Assistance for Intelligent Systems

Intelligent systems have become ubiquitous in modern life and increasingly shift the performance of tasks away from humans (Davenport and Kirby 2016). Although this development has many advantages, the interplay between intelligent systems and humans remains a societal and technological challenge (Maedche et al. 2019; Seeber et al. 2020). Taking humans out of the loop may lead to ‘‘mindless’’ ways of working and cause a range of errors due to unforeseen task complexities. Furthermore, human capabilities cannot always cope with intelligent systems’ functionalities (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016). In sum, intelligent systems have increased their capabilities and functionalities with a rapid pace and thereby widened the gap to the humans’ (cognitive) capabilities to comprehend and utilize these systems. One way to support humans in the usage of intelligent systems is providing user assistance that can be instantiated in many different forms such as conversational agents, guidance systems, recommendation agents, robo-advisors, and virtual assistants. Many contemporary user assistant systems rely on some form of either speech-based or textbased conversational user interface, both for receiving input from and delivering output to users using natural language processing (Maedche et al. 2019). Recent assistance functionalities in the private life context (e.g., navigation and mobility assistants or smart home assistants) have demonstrated their usefulness. Furthermore, technology giants (e.g., Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) have announced to release even smarter digital assistants to the market. In an organizational context, recent assistance functionalities support users in semi-automatic invoice processing and intelligent calendar management. In light of these increasingly powerful assistance functionalities, the role of user assistance for interactive intelligent systems deserves more research. Following earlier works by Benyon (2014) and Maedche et al. (2016), we suggest the following definition.

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