Talking to Multi-Party Conversational Agents in Advisory Services: Command-based vs. Conversational Interactions

Interacting with a conversational agent (CA) is becoming a major paradigm for human-technology interaction. Yet, ways for interacting with CAs are still forming, especially in situations involving more than one human. Starting an interaction with a CA might involve a wakeword and command. Alternatively, it could become active based on implicit requests and context information. Hence, CA designers face a serious dilemma: explicit commands disturb a natural conversation flow, while implicit requests might cause inadequate CA behavior. This study explores this dilemma and discusses observations from a project featuring a CA for financial advisory services. Advisors initially envisioned a CA that ''blends with the background'' and acts on context information. However, when engaging with a CA, they used conversational interactions in one part of the encounter and command-based interactions in another. We discuss this observation and contrast it against previous literature. This insight has implications for design and research.