Designing Anthropomorphic Enterprise Conversational Agents
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RESEARCH PAPER
Designing Anthropomorphic Enterprise Conversational Agents Stephan Diederich • Alfred Benedikt Brendel • Lutz M. Kolbe
Received: 12 July 2019 / Accepted: 17 February 2020 Ó The Author(s)
Abstract The increasing capabilities of conversational agents (CAs) offer manifold opportunities to assist users in a variety of tasks. In an organizational context, particularly their potential to simulate a human-like interaction via natural language currently attracts attention both at the customer interface as well as for internal purposes, often in the form of chatbots. Emerging experimental studies on CAs look into the impact of anthropomorphic design elements, so-called social cues, on user perception. However, while these studies provide valuable prescriptive knowledge of selected social cues, they neglect the potential detrimental influence of the limited responsiveness of present-day conversational agents. In practice, many CAs fail to continuously provide meaningful responses in a conversation due to the open nature of natural language interaction, which negatively influences user perception and often led to CAs being discontinued in the past. Thus, designing a CA that provides a human-like interaction experience while minimizing the risks associated with limited conversational capabilities represents a substantial design problem. This study addresses the aforementioned
Accepted after three revisions by the editors of the Special Issue.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-020-00639-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. S. Diederich (&) A. B. Brendel L. M. Kolbe Chair of Information Management, University of Go¨ttingen, Platz der Go¨ttinger Sieben 5, 37073 Go¨ttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. B. Brendel e-mail: [email protected] L. M. Kolbe e-mail: [email protected]
problem by proposing and evaluating a design for a CA that offers a human-like interaction experience while mitigating negative effects due to limited responsiveness. Through the presentation of the artifact and the synthesis of prescriptive knowledge in the form of a nascent design theory for anthropomorphic enterprise CAs, this research adds to the growing knowledge base for designing humanlike assistants and supports practitioners seeking to introduce them into their organizations. Keywords Conversational agent Anthropomorphism Social response theory Theory of uncanny valley Design science research
1 Introduction Technological advances, particularly in machine learning and natural language processing, continue to change the way in which we live, work, and interact with each other, thereby expanding the scope for innovation and automation of human activities (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016; Davenport and Kirby 2016). One phenomenon in this wave are conversational agents (CAs), defined as software which users interact with through natural language (McTear et al. 2016). Equippe
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