Designing Age-Inclusive Interfaces: Emerging Conversational and Generative AI to Support Interactions across the Life Span

We are concurrently witnessing two significant shifts: voice and chat-based conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are becoming ubiquitous (especially more recently due to advances in generative AI and LLMs - large language models), and older people are becoming a very large demographic group (and increasingly adopting of mobile technology on which such interfaces are present). However, despite the recent increase in research activity, age-relevant and inter/cross-generational aspects continue to be underrepresented in both research and commercial product design. Therefore, the overarching aim of this workshop is to increase the momentum for research within the space of hands-free, mobile, and conversational interfaces that centers on age-relevant and inter- and cross-generational interaction. For this, we plan to create an interdisciplinary space that brings together researchers, designers, practitioners, and users, to discuss and share challenges, principles, and strategies for designing such interfaces across the life span. We thus welcome contributions of empirical studies, theories, design, and evaluation of hands-free, mobile, and conversational interfaces designed with aging in mind (e.g. older adults or inter/cross-generational). We particularly encourage contributions focused on leveraging recent advances in generative AI or LLMs. Through this, we aim to grow the community of CUI researchers across disciplinary boundaries (human-computer interaction, voice and language technologies, geronto-technologies, information studies, etc.) that are engaged in the shared goal of ensuring that the aging dimension is appropriately incorporated in mobile / conversational interaction design research.