Problem formulation: The problem that the thesis research relates to is the limitations of artificially intelligent chatbots as interlocutors. The emotional component of communication plays an essential role in the customer experience, but many users have a negative attitude toward chatbots due to their lack of humanity and empathy. The potential of the new ChatGPT in changing user attitudes toward chatbots is also being explored. However, the limited data available on recent versions of ChatGPT presents an additional challenge for research in this area.  Purpose: Our study aims to study people's emotional responses to human-like chatbots and their impact on user satisfaction. We also explore whether human likeness is a crucial driver of chatbot preference and how the new ChatGPT can change user attitudes toward them in a positive way.  Theoretical framework: The study's theoretical framework considers various aspects of using chatbots based on artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing. In this context, we observe ChatGPT as a revolutionary breakthrough in customer service, capable of improving customer experience and interaction with customer. We emphasise the emotional component of human-chatbot interactions, investigating customer emotions, attitudes, and trust, as well as the chatbot's capacity for empathy and human-like characteristics. Drawing from this theoretical exploration, we formulate four hypotheses to guide our research. Methodology: This quantitative study involves 79 respondents aged 18 years and over. The online survey was conducted using social media for dissemination. The empirical data obtained were coded and analysed using the SPSS program.  Empirical findings: Our study confirms the hypothesis of diverse emotional responses (H4) and a generally neutral emotional response during chatbot interactions (H3). We also find partial support for the presence of negative emotions (H2), but not for consistent positive emotions (H1). The data indicate a range of emotional responses, highlighting the complexity of human reactions to chatbots. Conclusion: Our research provides an overall picture of users' emotional responses to interactions with chatbots. Users show a variety of emotions, mostly neutral, which can change depending on the interaction. We also discovered the potential of the new ChatGPT in changing user attitudes towards chatbots in a more positive or neutral direction. The study also uncovers factors influencing users' emotional responses, such as age, attitudes, and past experiences. The results can be used to develop more effective marketing and business strategies for interacting with chatbots.

<p>  </p> <p>With robot utilization reaching $300 million in the hospitality industry, this paper aims to examine the difference in customer response between two types of anthropomorphic features (cute vs. cool) of service robots. Four scenario-based experiments (2 [robot appearances: cute vs. cool] x 2 [customer–company relationship norms: communal vs. exchange]) were employed in two different contexts (Study 1: service successful and Study 2: failure). The results showed that cute robots elicit higher customer satisfaction, repatronage intention, and willingness to spread positive word of mouth when customers were in a communal relationship with a company. The difference was significant only in the situation in which the robots’ service failed. This study offers the industry guidelines to decide on robot design according to their relationship with the customer and develops the topic of anthropomorphism in robots in that it looked into the different traits within anthropomorphism rather than human likeness versus nonhuman likeness.</p>

Screen readers for visually impaired users are poorly optimized for e-commerce websites hence the exclusion of the content. It creates a societal need for accessibility of the content in e-commerce websites for the visually impaired users. This study explores how six blindfolded participants could co-design a Voice User Interface (VUI) in an e-commerce website to convey its information that creates a good user experience for visually impaired. The result of a co-design workshop with interaction design practices showed that a VUI should be humanlike and convey relevant information. Failed speech recognition and overwhelming information had a negative impact on the user experience. To cope with the problems, the VUI should provide more control to the users by conveying explicit confirmations and retrospective information from past shopping trips. Due to the difficulties in finding visually impaired participants, the design process was not completed hence the ideation needs an additional design process.

<p dir="ltr">Highway safety continues to pose a serious challenge to the social sustainability of transportation systems, and initiatives are being pursued at all levels of government to reduce the high fatality count of 42,000. At the same time, it is sought to ensure higher travel efficiency in order to increase economic productivity. The emergence of automated transportation provides great promise to mitigate these ills of the transportation sector that have persisted for so many decades. With regards to safety, such promise is rooted in the capability of autonomous vehicles to self-drive some or all of the time, thus reducing the impact of inherently errant human driving to which 95% of all crashes have been attributed. With regards to mobility, such promise is guided by the capability of the autonomous vehicle to carry out path planning, navigation, and vehicle controls in ways that are far more efficient than the human brain, thereby facilitating mobility and reducing congestion-related issues such as delay, emissions, driver frustration, and so on.</p><p dir="ltr">Unfortunately, the two key outcomes (safety and mobility) are reciprocal in the sense that navigation solutions that enhance safety generally tend to reduce mobility, and vice versa. As such, there is a need to assign values explicit to these performance criteria in order to develop balanced solutions for AV decisions. Most existing machine-learning-based path planning algorithms derive these weights using a learning approach. Unfortunately, the stability of these weights across time, individuals, and trip types, is not guaranteed. It is necessary to develop weights and processes that are trip situation-specific. Secondly, user trust in automation remains a key issue, given the relatively recent emergence of this technology and a few highly-publicized crashes, which has led to reservations among potential users.</p><p dir="ltr">To address these research questions, this thesis identifies various situational contexts of the problem, identifies the alternatives (the viable trajectories by fitting curves between the vehicle maneuver’s initial and final positions), develops the decision criteria (safety, mobility, comfort), carries out weighting of the criteria to reflect their relative significance, and scales the criteria to develop dimensionless equivalents of their raw values. Finally, a process for amalgamating the overall impacts of each driving decision alternative is developed based on the weighted and scaled criteria, to identify the best decision (optimal trajectory path). This multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem involves the collection of data through questionnaire surveys.</p><p dir="ltr">The weights obtained early in the MCDM process could be integrated into any one of two types of planning algorithms. First, they could be incorporated into interpolating curve-based planning algorithms, to identify the optimal trajectory based on human preferences. Additionally, they can be integrated into optimization-based planning algorithms to allocate weights to the various functions used.</p><p dir="ltr">Overall, this research aims to align the behavior of autonomous vehicles closely with human-driven vehicles, serving two primary purposes: first, facilitating their seamless coexistence on mixed-traffic roads and second, enhancing public acceptance of autonomous vehicles.</p>

There is abundant anecdotal evidence substantiating Mori’s initial observation of the "uncanny valley", a point at which human response to non-human entities drops sharply with respect to comfort (Mori, 1970), and the construct itself has a long-standing history in both Robotics and Psychology. Currently, many fields such as design, training, entertainment, and education make use of heuristic approaches to accommodate the anticipated needs of the user/consumer/audience in certain important aspects. This is due to the lack of empirical substantiation or, in some cases, the impossibility of rigorous quantification; one such area is with respect to the user’s experience of uncanniness, a feeling of "eeriness" or "wrongness" when interacting with artefacts or environments. Uncanniness, however, continues to be defined and measured in a largely subjective way, and often after the fact; an experience or product’s uncanny features are pointed out after the item has been markedly avoided or complained about by the general public. These studies are among the first seeking to determine a constellation of personality traits and physiological responses that incline the user to have a more frequent or profound "uncanny" reaction when presented with stimuli meeting the criteria for a level of "eeriness". In study 1, 395 adults were asked to categorize 200 images as uncanny, neutral, pleasant, or other. In Study 2, physiological and eye-tracking data was collected from twenty two adults as they viewed uncanny, neutral and pleasant images culled from study 1. This research identifies components of the uncanny valley related to subjective assessment, personality factors (using the HEXACO and Anthropomorphic Tendencies Scale), and biophysical measures, and found that traits unique to Emotionality on the HEXACO inventory, compounded with a form of anthropomorphism demonstrates a level of relationship to the subjective experience of uncanny stimuli. There is evidence that HEXACO type and forms of anthropomorphic perception mediates the biophysical iv expression and the subjective perception of the stimuli. In keeping with psychological hypotheses, stimuli to which the participants had greatest response centered on death, the threat of death, or mismatched/absent facial features.