Social Interaction with a Conversational Agent: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Conversational agents that display many human qualities have become a valuable method business uses to communicate with online users to supply services or products, to help in online order process or to search the Web. The gaming industry and education may benefit from this type of interface. In this type of chats, users could have different alternatives: text display, photo of a real person, or a cartoon drawing and others. This is an exploratory study that reviews five randomly chosen conversations that an animated chatbot has with Web users. The character simulates human gestures, but they are stylized to reproduce animation standards. The goal of this exploratory study is to provide feedback that will help designers to improve the functionality of the conversational agent, identify user’s needs, define future research, and learn from previous errors. The methodology used was qualitative content analysis.