How should my chatbot interact? A survey on human-chatbot interaction design
Ana Paula Chaves, Marco Aurelio Gerosa
TL;DR
This paper tackles the challenge of designing chatbots with social capabilities by surveying 56 studies across domains to build a conceptual model of chatbot social characteristics. It categorizes traits into Conversational Intelligence, Social Intelligence, and Personification, detailing benefits, challenges, and actionable strategies for each. The authors derive 22 propositions about interrelationships among traits and discuss how humanness and context shape user perception and interaction quality. The work provides practical guidance for researchers and designers to tailor social features to context while highlighting gaps— notably in moral agency and thoroughness— and outlining directions for evaluating impact on user satisfaction. Overall, the study advances human-chatbot interaction design by clarifying which social characteristics matter, how they interact, and how to implement them in text-based, disembodied chatbots.
Abstract
Chatbots' growing popularity has brought new challenges to HCI, having changed the patterns of human interactions with computers. The increasing need to approximate conversational interaction styles raises expectations for chatbots to present social behaviors that are habitual in human-human communication. In this survey, we argue that chatbots should be enriched with social characteristics that cohere with users' expectations, ultimately avoiding frustration and dissatisfaction. We bring together the literature on disembodied, text-based chatbots to derive a conceptual model of social characteristics for chatbots. We analyzed 56 papers from various domains to understand how social characteristics can benefit human-chatbot interactions and identify the challenges and strategies to designing them. Additionally, we discussed how characteristics may influence one another. Our results provide relevant opportunities to both researchers and designers to advance human-chatbot interactions.