Conversational Crowdsourcing (by Sihang Qiu, Ujwal Gadiraju, Alessandro Bozzon and Geert-Jan Houben)

The trend of remote work leads to the prosperity of crowdsourcing marketplaces. In crowdsourcing marketplaces, online workers can select their preferable tasks and then complete them to get paid, while requesters design and publish tasks to acquire their desirable data. The conventional user interface of the crowdsourcing task is the web page, where users provide answers using HTML-based web elements, and the task-related information (including instructions and questions) is displayed on a single web page. Although the conventional way of presenting tasks is straightforward, it could negatively affect workers' satisfaction and performance by causing problems such as boredom and fatigue. To address this challenge, we proposed a novel paradigm --- conversational crowdsourcing, which employs conversational interfaces to facilitate crowdsourcing task execution. With conversational crowdsourcing, workers receive task information as messages from a conversational agent, and provide answers by sending messages back to the agent. In this vision paper, we introduce our recent work in terms of using conversational crowdsourcing to improve worker performance and experience by employing novel human-computer interaction affordances. Our findings reveal that conversational crowdsourcing has important implications in improving the worker satisfaction and requester-worker relationship in crowdsourcing marketplaces.