What is Natural? Challenges and Opportunities for Conversational Recommender Systems

This position paper describes a fundamental user research to uncover the challenges and opportunities for a conversational recommender system in different environments. The participants recounted their previous experiences of interacting with conversational agents in a critical incident interview, followed by a task to explore restaurant recommendations with Google Assistant, and a closing discussion on conversational recommendations. We organize the challenges faced into three levels: environment, conversation, and system. Further, we illustrate the identified opportunities of whispering interaction, collaborative recommendations, driving scenario, and local-like conversations for delivering recommendations.