System Personality and Persuasion in Human-Computer Dialogue

Abstract

The human-computer dialogue research field has been studying interaction with computers since the early stage of Artificial Intelligence, however, research has often focused on very practical tasks to be completed with the dialogues. A new trend in the field tries to implement persuasive techniques with automated interactive agents; unlike booking a train ticket, for example, such dialogues require the system to show more anthropomorphic qualities. The influences of such qualities in the effectiveness of persuasive dialogue is only starting to be studied. In this article we focus on one important perceived trait of the system: personality, and explore how it influences the persuasiveness of a dialogue system. We introduce a new persuasive dialogue system and combine it with a state of the art personality utterance generator. By doing so, we can control the system’s extraversion personality trait and observe its influence on the user’s perception of the dialogue and its output. In particular, we observe that the user’s extraversion influences their perception of the dialogue and its persuasiveness, and that the perceived personality of the system can affect its trustworthiness and persuasiveness. We believe that theses observations will help to set up guidelines to tailor dialogue systems to the user’s interaction expectations and improve the persuasive interventions.