25th Conference on Discourse and Conversation Analysis

The team presented “Maintaining the illusion of interaction in human--conversational AI talk” at the 25th Conference on Discourse and Conversation Analysis (Technology Use and Social Interaction: New Interactive Practices, New Data and Methods), hosted by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany. Link

The paper engages a central design problem for voice user interfaces: how to support smooth, mutually intelligible interaction while being transparent about the non-human status of the agent. The talk is the team’s first major European conference appearance of 2026, and forms part of a sustained effort to translate Newcastle’s CA-based design method into a vocabulary that is legible to both interactional researchers and conversational AI engineers.