Effects of nonverbal communication on Chatbot's perceived personality and user satisfaction

As artificial intelligence develops rapidly, companies have created exclusive chatbots to facilitate conversational commerce and establish an emotional connection between their brands and their customers. Therefore, shaping the chatbot personality to match the brand image is often the focus of chatbot design. Two studies were conducted to investigate how nonverbal communication elements (avatar, sticker, emoji) affect users' judgment of chatbot personality and explore the effect of chatbot personality on user satisfaction. In Study 1, Kansei engineering was adopted to conduct an online survey using six combinations of nonverbal elements as experimental conditions and the five dimensions of the Brand Personality Scale as Kansei vocabularies. The results revealed that the three nonverbal elements did affect users' perceptions of chatbot personalities; however, the impacts of each element on different personality dimensions varied. In Study 2, based on Study 1, two crowdfunding chatbots with distinct personality traits, sincere and insincere, were developed as the experimental conditions to interact with participants within FB messenger. One hundred fifty valid questionnaires and the click rate of participants during the experiment were collected to measure participants' satisfaction. The results showed that participants were more satisfied with the sincere chatbot than the insincere chatbot. In addition, the personality of the chatbots also affected the participants' judgment of the quality of the messages as well as their willingness to use the chatbots.