Orla Cooney

Title: Designing speech agents to support mental health

Supervision Team: Benjamin Cowan, UCD / Gavin Doherty, TCD

Description:

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) could be highly effective for delivering mental health interventions, allowing users to disclose sensitive information and engage without judgment. This PhD will fuse knowledge from HCI , psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, speech technology and mental health research to identify how to most effectively design VUIs for mental health applications. In particular, the PhD will focus on how 1) speech synthesis; 2) the linguistic content of utterances; 3) the type of dialogue used by such agents impact engagement in mental health intervention. This high impact research topic will break new ground by demonstrating the impact of speech interface design choices on user experience and user engagement in this context. The successful candidate will be based at University College Dublin (UCD) and will be part of the HCI@UCD group.