Imagining Personality for AI Chatbots
Demonstrating a chatbot’s personality through its orientation to conversation.
Context
Our design team of three was engaged by a telecommunications and networking technology company to design a chatbot component for a text-based, enterprise chat ecosystem. Stakeholders wanted to understand the potential possibilities for creating chatbots with a personality.
Goal
Our goals were to explore whether a chatbot should have a personality; and if so, how it would come to life through an intelligent system and interface. In other words, how would the bot’s personality be presented to human conversational partners?
Process
We created personas for users of different personalities and a persona for a bot to test the concept, and articulated scenarios that represented different interpersonal experiences. I took the lead reviewing technical, HCI, and cognitive and social psychological literature to support a conceptual model that facilitated defining requirements. We then prepared a prototype to demonstrate the possibilities for a bot’s personality.
Result
Our prototype included mockups demonstrating and an AI-backed system architecture to support a bot that presents its personality through its orientation to conversation with humans. The bot’s personality is initialized by an enterprise through an intelligent UI/workflow to define context and other parameters. And, with the help of natural language processing, the bot can assess personality-driven, conversational needs of its human conversational partners and use communication accommodation strategies to maintain cooperative conversation.
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