Look Who’s Talking
Towards Engaging Long-Term Interactions with Conversational Agents

About the project
Look Who’s Talking is an interdisciplinary collaboration between three universities from the Netherlands, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), working together to develop and test a new generation of conversational agents (chatbots) which can engage with humans in long-term motivational interactions. The main aim of this project is to create and field-test chatbots designed to develop and foster long-term engaging and human-like conversations with humans for two technologically and linguistically diverse domains (smoking cessation and promotion of safe sex, respectively) based on recent insights from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, humanities, and social sciences with expertise from our societal partners. Additionally, we will study if and how people build up a social relationship with such more advanced chatbots, and what the ethical implications of communication with such health chatbots are.
Chatbots
Roby the smoking cessation bot
Roby’s main function is getting to know smokers’ behaviour by a conversational assessment. It also provides personalized normative feedback and discusses with smokers potential reasons to quit smoking. We “trained” Roby with motivational interviewing techniques and skills, to be a helpful addition in motivating smokers to quit!
MISH the sexual health bot
MISH is a text-based chatbot that primarily makes use of motivational interviewing (MI) techniques to promote sexual health. This prototype has been designed to address condom use. While the intended target population is heterosexual couples in a steady relationship, initial testing will be conducted with individuals.
Output
What we have produced during the project so far. Our publications, posters, presentations, and more.
2023
Basar, E., Balaji, D., He, L., Hendrickx, I., Krahmer, E., de Bruijn, G., & Bosse, T. (2023). HyLECA: A Framework for Developing Hybrid Long-term Engaging Controlled Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI’23). ACM.
2022
He, L., Balaji, D., Wiers, R. W., Antheunis, M. L., & Krahmer, E. (2022). Effectiveness and acceptability of conversational agents for smoking cessation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. In Nicotine & Tobacco Research.
Balaji, D., He, L., Giani, S., Bosse, T., Wiers, R., & de Bruijn, G. J. (2022). Effectiveness and acceptability of conversational agents for sexual health promotion: a systematic review and meta-analysis. In Sexual health, 19(5), 391-405.
He, L., Basar, E., Wiers, R. W., Antheunis, M. L,. & Krahmer, E. (2022). Can chatbots help to motivate smoking cessation? A study on the effectiveness of motivational interviewing on engagement and therapeutic alliance. In BMC Public Health, 22(1), 1-14.
Basar, E., Hendrickx, I., Krahmer, E., de Bruijn, G., & Bosse, T. (2022). Hints of Independence in a Pre-scripted World: On Controlled Usage of Open-domain Language Models for Chatbots in Highly Sensitive Domains. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence – Volume 1, pages 401-407.
2021
Hendrickx, I., Cena, F., Basar, E., Di Caro, L., Kunneman, F., Musi, E., Musto, C., Rapp, A. & van Waterschoot, J. (2021). Towards a new generation of personalized intelligent conversational agents. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 373-374).
Our team
Look Who’s Talking research group consists of many experts from multiple disciplines assuming different roles in our project.
Supervisory Team
PhD Candidates

Divyaa Balaji, M.Sc.
University of Amsterdam
Human Factors
Focus on communication about promoting safe sex behaviour
Societal & Industrial Partners
Drs. Erwin Fisser
SOA Aids Nederland
Societal partner; safe sex promotion
Prof. Dr. Marc Willemsen
Trimbos Instituut
Societal partner; smoking cessation and public health
Dr. Sander Wubben
Flow.ai
Industrial partner; practical design of chatbots
Collaborating Experts
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Andre
Augsburg University
Computational dialogue modelling
Prof. Dr. Ehud Reiter
University of Aberdeen
Natural language generation
Prof. Dr. Rob Ruiter
Maastricht University
Health communication and health promotion
Prof. Dr. Robert West
University College London
Addiction and behaviour change
Our partners






This project is partly financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) with project number 406.DI.19.054

Timeline
Sept 2020 … » M33 » M34 » M35 »… Mar 2025
Get in touch
If you have any questions or just want to say hello, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll get back to you soon.