Position Paper: A Personalized Large Language Model (LLM)-Based Chat Companion for Autistic Children Early Intervention

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by restricted and repetitive sensory-motor behaviors and social communication deficits. Though in the recent decade, a rising interest has been demonstrated among the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and broader computing communities in involving multitudes of technologies to support autistic individuals especially children with autism over diverse aspects, the technologies are revealed to often reflect the normative expectations of a neurotypical society and be very one-sided. Thus, autistic children are commonly required to learn the 'appropriate' norm of social interaction defined by neurotypical society. In this work, instead of 'forcing' autistic children to accommodate technology, we propose a self-advocacy chat companion for autistic children based on the Large Language Model (LLM) as an early intervention tool. In the meantime, we hope it could also serve as a source platform that engages neurotypical users (such as parents) in understanding and learning how to interact and communicate with autistic children.