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Creating Humanlike Chatbots: What Chatbot Developers Could Learn from Webcare Employees in Adopting a Conversational Human Voice

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Chatbot Research and Design (CONVERSATIONS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11970))

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Abstract

Currently, conversations with chatbots are perceived as unnatural and impersonal. One way to enhance the feeling of humanlike responses is by implementing an engaging communication style (i.e., Conversational Human Voice (CHV); Kelleher 2009) which positively affects people’s perceptions of the organization. This communication style contributes to the effectiveness of online communication between organizations and customers (i.e., webcare), and is of high relevance to chatbot design and development. This project aimed to investigate how insights on the use of CHV in organizations’ messages and the perceptions of CHV can be implemented in customer service automation. A corpus study was conducted to investigate which linguistic elements are used in organizations’ messages. Subsequently, an experiment was conducted to assess to what extent linguistic elements contribute to the perception of CHV. Based on these two studies, we investigated whether the amount of CHV can be identified automatically. These findings could be used to design humanlike chatbots that use a natural and personal communication style like their human conversation partner.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The OBI4wan monitoring tool enables organizations to monitor and manage stakeholders’ messages on multiple public and social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp).

  2. 2.

    The beta-version of the tool can be tested on request by the authors and OBI4wan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Christine Liebrecht

  2. VU Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Charlotte van Hooijdonk

Authors
  1. Christine Liebrecht
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  2. Charlotte van Hooijdonk
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christine Liebrecht .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. SINTEF, Oslo, Norway

    Asbjørn Følstad

  2. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Theo Araujo

  3. CERTH-ITI, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Symeon Papadopoulos

  4. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Effie Lai-Chong Law

  5. University of Agder, Grimstad, Norway

    Ole-Christoffer Granmo

  6. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Ewa Luger

  7. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Petter Bae Brandtzaeg

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Liebrecht, C., van Hooijdonk, C. (2020). Creating Humanlike Chatbots: What Chatbot Developers Could Learn from Webcare Employees in Adopting a Conversational Human Voice. In: Følstad, A., et al. Chatbot Research and Design. CONVERSATIONS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11970. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39540-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39540-7_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39539-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39540-7

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