People are not always able to respond immediately to incoming messages on their mobile devices, either due to engagement in another task or simply because the moment is inconvenient for them. This delay in responding could affect social relationships, as there are often expectations associated with mobile messaging and people may experience a lingering pressure to attend to their messages. In this work, we investigate an approach for generating automated contextual responses on behalf of message recipients when they are not available to respond. We first identify several types of contextual information that can be obtained from a user’s smartphone and explore whether those can be used to explain unavailability. We then assess users’ perception of the usefulness of these sensor-based categories and their level of comfort with sharing such information through a Mechanical Turk survey study. Our results show emergent groups with varying preferences with regards to the usefulness and comfort in sharing two types of contextual information: user state and device state. Further, we also observed a strong influence of message context (i.e., message urgency and social tie strength) in users’ perceptions of these auto-generated messages. Our research provides understanding of users’ perceptions of sharing context through an autonomous agent that can help design and create effective approaches towards enabling communication awareness.

人们不总是能够立即响应其移动设备上的传入消息，这可能是由于参与其他任务，或者仅仅是因为此刻对他们而言很不方便。响应的这种延迟可能会影响社会关系，因为经常会有与移动消息相关的期望，并且人们可能会承受挥之不去的压力来收听他们的消息。在这项工作中，我们研究了一种在消息收件人无法响应时代表他们自动生成上下文响应的方法。我们首先确定可以从用户的智能手机获得的几种类型的上下文信息，并探讨是否可以使用这些上下文信息来解释不可用性。然后，我们通过Mechanical Turk调查研究评估用户对这些基于传感器的类别的有用性及其共享此类信息的舒适度的感知。我们的结果表明，新兴群体对于共享两种类型的上下文信息的有用性和舒适性有不同的偏爱：用户状态和设备状态。此外，我们还观察到了消息上下文（即消息紧迫性和社交联系强度）在用户对这些自动生成消息的感知中的强大影响。我们的研究通过自治代理来了解用户对共享上下文的看法，该代理可以帮助设计和创建有效的方法来实现交流意识。