Creating Humanlike Chatbots: What Chatbot Developers Could Learn from Webcare Employees in Adopting a Conversational Human Voice

Christine Liebrecht*, Charlotte van Hooijdonk

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Currently, conversations with chatbots are perceived as unnatural and impersonal. One way to enhance the feeling of humanlike responses is by implementing an engaging communication style (i.e., Conversational Human Voice (CHV); Kelleher 2009) which positively affects people’s perceptions of the organization. This communication style contributes to the effectiveness of online communication between organizations and customers (i.e., webcare), and is of high relevance to chatbot design and development. This project aimed to investigate how insights on the use of CHV in organizations’ messages and the perceptions of CHV can be implemented in customer service automation. A corpus study was conducted to investigate which linguistic elements are used in organizations’ messages. Subsequently, an experiment was conducted to assess to what extent linguistic elements contribute to the perception of CHV. Based on these two studies, we investigated whether the amount of CHV can be identified automatically. These findings could be used to design humanlike chatbots that use a natural and personal communication style like their human conversation partner.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationChatbot Research and Design
Subtitle of host publicationThird International Workshop, CONVERSATIONS 2019, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 19–20, 2019, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsAsbjørn Følstad, Theo Araujo, Symeon Papadopoulos, Effie Lai-Chong Law, Ole-Christoffer Granmo, Ewa Luger, Petter Bae Brandtzaeg
PublisherSpringer
Pages51-64
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-030-39540-7
ISBN (Print)978-3-030-39539-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event3rd International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design, CONVERSATIONS 2019 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: 19 Nov 201920 Nov 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11970 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference3rd International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design, CONVERSATIONS 2019
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period19/11/1920/11/19

Keywords

  • Chatbots
  • Conversational Human Voice
  • Linguistic elements
  • Tool development

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