Abstract
In recent years, chatbots have been spreading on social networks and brand websites, and interactions between users and commercial chatbots have become an ordinary experience in the range of human-computer interactions. Yet, whereas automated conversation has been analyzed in various experimental contexts, only a few studies describe real-world interactions with voicebots [1,2,3] or chatbots [4,5,6]. How do interactions with chatbots actually take place? What is an AI-driven commercial conversation in practice? To address these questions, we conducted a sociological study of interactions with chatbots, based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of interaction logs with a vending chatbot, deployed on a French online telecom company. The study relies on a dataset of 9 months of ComBot usage logs in 2019, representing roughly 47,000 interaction sessions. Our analysis shows that interactions with the commercial chatbot are a highly hybrid format between click-based interfaces and conversational interactions. A majority of users mobilize the conventions of commercial conversation to express their need in plain text. However, the rest of the dialogue mainly combines response-buttons, short input text, and hyperlinks. The use of politeness shows that users are keen on following the conversational interaction format offered to them, even if they don’t use it entirely.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Porcheron, M., Fischer, J.E., Reeves, S., Sharples, S.: Voice interfaces in everyday life. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2018, pp. 1–12. ACM Press, Montreal (2018)
Sciuto, A., Saini, A., Forlizzi, J., Hong, J.I.: “Hey Alexa, what’s up?”: A mixed-methods studies of in-home conversational agent usage. In: Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018 - DIS 2018, pp. 857–868. ACM Press, Hong Kong, China (2018)
Beneteau, E., Richards, O.K., Zhang, M., et al.: Communication breakdowns between families and Alexa. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 243:1–243:13. ACM, New York (2019)
Jain, M., Kumar, P., Kota, R., Patel, S.N.: Evaluating and informing the design of chatbots. In: Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018 - DIS 2018, pp. 895–906. ACM Press, Hong Kong (2018)
Følstad, A., Skjuve, M., Brandtzaeg, P.B.: Different chatbots for different purposes: towards a typology of chatbots to understand interaction design. In: Bodrunova, S.S., et al. (eds.) INSCI 2018. LNCS, vol. 11551, pp. 145–156. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_13
Bittner, E., Shoury, O.: Designing automated facilitation for design thinking: a chatbot for supporting teams in the empathy map method (2019)
Følstad, A., Nordheim, C.B., Bjørkli, C.A.: What makes users trust a chatbot for customer service? An exploratory interview study. In: Bodrunova, S.S. (ed.) INSCI 2018. LNCS, vol. 11193, pp. 194–208. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01437-7_16
Myers, C., Furqan, A., Nebolsky, J., et al.: Patterns for how users overcome obstacles in voice user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2018, pp. 1–7. ACM Press, Montreal (2018)
Ashktorab, Z., Jain, M., Liao, Q.V., Weisz, J.D.: Resilient chatbots: repair strategy preferences for conversational breakdowns. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 254:1–254:12. ACM, New York (2019)
Purington, A., Taft, J.G., Sannon, S., et al.: “Alexa is my new BFF”: social roles, user satisfaction, and personification of the Amazon echo. In: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA 2017, pp. 2853–2859. ACM Press, Denver (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Esteban, C., Beauvisage, T. (2020). Interacting with a Salesman Chatbot. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S. (eds) HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Posters. HCII 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1293. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60700-5_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60700-5_39
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-60699-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-60700-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)