The first conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI)(pronounced “coo-ee”) was in 2019 and aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines examining the design of speech and language technologies. In 2022, CUI joined SIGCHI, the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.
The CUI community goes back to before the ACM conference began and sprang from a set of special interest workshops arranged in other conferences such as CHI, Mobile HCI and IUI. I began collaborating with what became the CUI community in 2014 when I was one of the organisers of the workshop led by Cosmin Munteanu Designing speech and language interactions held at CHI that year. Cosmin, who had also organised a panel on speech and HCI in CHI ‘13, was one of the few figures in speech technology in the CHI community at the time and the lack of work in speech based interaction at CHI inspired my first satirical Alt.Chi paper None of a CHInd: Relationship Counselling for HCI and Speech Technology]( https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2559206.2578868) .
With Cosmin and others we arranged workshops in conferences almost every year (sometimes more frequently) and the attendees includes Ben Cowan and Liegh Clark who were the conference chairs for CUI 2019. In CHI 2018 we got to know another group of researchers from Nottingham also working in the field and we soon joined forces for further workshops.
In late 2018, Ben told me he was thinking of getting everyone together to start the CUI conference. Generally starting a new conference is extremely hard and personally I thought it would be too difficult. I was wrong, the work all the community put in to getting CUI off the ground has been incredible. I can truly say ot is one of the nicest groups I have every worked with and CUI will always have a place in my heart.