When the Interviewer Is a Bot: Behavior, Breakdowns, and Trust in MLLM-Led Interviews

Semi-structured interviews are a cornerstone of qualitative research but remain labor-intensive. We report an empirical study of what actually happens when the interviewer is an off-the-shelf real-time multimodal LLM (MLLM). We built InterviewBot, a voice-based interviewing system that wraps a real-...