• DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-67744-6_28
• Corpus ID: 36556565

How Do You Want Your Chatbot? An Exploratory Wizard-of-Oz Study with Young, Urban Indians

@inproceedings{MedhiThies2017HowDY,
  title={How Do You Want Your Chatbot? An Exploratory Wizard-of-Oz Study with Young, Urban Indians},
  author={Indrani Medhi-Thies and Nandita Menon and Sneha Magapu and Manisha Subramony and Jacki O'Neill},
  booktitle={IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction},
  year={2017}
}

• Indrani Medhi-Thies, Nandita Menon, +2 authors J. O'Neill
• Published in
  IFIP TC13 International…
  25 September 2017
• Computer Science

As text-messaging chatbots become increasingly “human”, it will be important to understand the personal interactions that users are seeking with a chatbot. What chatbot personalities are most compelling to young, urban users in India? To explore this question, we first conducted exploratory Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) studies with 14 users that simulated interactions with a hypothetical chatbot. We evaluated three personalities for the chatbot—Maya, a productivity oriented bot with nerd wit; Ada, a fun, flirtatious bot; and Evi, an emotional buddy bot. We followed up with one-on-one interviews with the users discussing their experiences with each of the chatbots, what they liked, and what they did not. Overall our results show that users wanted a chatbot like Maya, who could add value to their life while being a friend, by making useful recommendations. But they also wanted preferred traits of Ada and Evi infused into Maya.