Artificial Intelligence in Conversational Agents

Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining traction in service-oriented businesses in the form of chatbots. A chatbot is a popular type of social AI that uses natural language processing to communicate with users. Past studies have shown discrepancies in terms of whether or not a chatbot should communicate and behave like a human. This article aims to explore these discrepancies in order to provide a theoretical contribution of a list of factors related to perceived humanness in chatbots and how these may consequently lead to a positive user experience. The results suggest that a chatbot should have the following characteristics: avoiding small talk and maintaining a formal tone; identifying itself as a bot and asking how it can help; providing specific information and articulating itself with sophisticated choices of words and well-constructed sentences; asking follow-up questions during decision-making processes and; providing an apology when the context is not comprehensible, followed by a question or a statement to dynamically move a conversation forward. These results may have implications for designers working in the field of AI as well as for the wider debates and the broader discourse around the adoption of AI in society.