Hey Google, Do You Have a Personality? Designing Personality and Personas for Conversational Agents

Abstract

Conversational agents designed to interact through natural language are often imbued with human-like personalities. At times, the agent might also have a distinct persona with traits such as gender, age, or a backstory. Designing such personality or persona for conversational agents has become a common design practice. In this work, we review the emerging literature on designing agent persona or personality, and reflect on these approaches, along with the personas that are created for common conversational agents. We discuss open questions with regards to three aspects: meeting user needs, the ethics of deception, and reinforcing social stereotypes through conversational agents. We hope this work can provoke researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on their approach for designing personality or persona of conversational agents.