Conveying chatbot personality through conversational cues in social media messages

Abstract

A perceived personality of a chatbot or conversational agent is mainly conveyed by the way they communicate verbally. In this online vignette study (N = 168) we examined the possibility of conveying personality in short social-media-like messages by adding simple conversational cues. Social-oriented and responsive conversational cues, as well as their combination had distinct effects on the perceived personalities of the chatbots. Social-oriented cues had a clear effect on most OCEAN personality traits, warmth, and anthropomorphism, while responsive cues only affected neuroticism. In combination, effects of social-oriented cues were countered by responsive cues, but not for all personality traits. Competence and trust were not affected by any of the used conversational cues. The findings show that very few conversational cues are sufficient to convey distinct personalities in short messages.