  Interview chatbots engage users in a text-based conversation to draw out
their views and opinions. It is, however, challenging to build effective
interview chatbots that can handle user free-text responses to open-ended
questions and deliver engaging user experience. As the first step, we are
investigating the feasibility and effectiveness of using publicly available,
practical AI technologies to build effective interview chatbots. To demonstrate
feasibility, we built a prototype scoped to enable interview chatbots with a
subset of active listening skills - the abilities to comprehend a user's input
and respond properly. To evaluate the effectiveness of our prototype, we
compared the performance of interview chatbots with or without active listening
skills on four common interview topics in a live evaluation with 206 users. Our
work presents practical design implications for building effective interview
chatbots, hybrid chatbot platforms, and empathetic chatbots beyond interview
tasks.
