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Genie in the Bottle: Anthropomorphized Perceptions of Conversational Agents

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative multi-phase study seeking to identify patterns in users' anthropomorphized perceptions of conversational agents. Through a comparative analysis of behavioral perceptions and visual conceptions of three agents - Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri - we first show that the perceptions of an agent's character are structured according to five categories: approachability, sentiment toward a user, professionalism, intelligence, and individuality. We then explore visualizations of the agents' appearance and discuss the specifics assigned to each agent. Finally, we analyze associative explanations for these perceptions. We demonstrate that the anthropomorphized behavioral and visual perceptions of agents yield structural consistency and discuss how these perceptions are linked with each other and system features.

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References

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
10688 pages
ISBN:9781450367080
DOI:10.1145/3313831
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 23 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. anthropomorphism
  2. behavioral
  3. conversational agents
  4. interaction
  5. personification
  6. user perception
  7. visual

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  • Natural Science and EngineeringResearch Council of Canada (NSERC)

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  • (2024)CUI@CHI 2024: Building Trust in CUIs—From Design to DeploymentExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3636287(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Designing for Harm Reduction: Communication Repair for Multicultural Users' Voice InteractionsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642900(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Anthropomorphism and Affective Perception: Dimensions, Measurements, and Interdependencies in Aerial RoboticsIEEE Transactions on Affective Computing10.1109/TAFFC.2024.334985815:3(1463-1474)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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