Users, Tasks, and Conversational Agents: A Personality Study

Abstract

Conversational Agents (CA) have become one of the common user interfaces in many online domains. In this paper, we ask whether users have a preference about the personality of CAs, and whether this preference changes depending on the length and type of the tasks CAs are used for. In an online study (N = 410), we investigated three different CA personalities (introvert, extrovert, and non-personified) in four different tasks with different natures and lengths (teaching, booking, todo, and weather). Most of the participants preferred to interact with a conversational agent (introvert or extrovert) as opposed to a non-personified interface, regardless of their own personality. Results suggested that this preference may be task dependent: when CA’s goal was to provide information, participants preferred an extrovert agent. We did not observe a difference between the preference for introvert and extrovert agents when the task’s goal was to complete an assignment.