Effect of Polite Triggers in Chatbot Conversations on User Experience across Gender, Age, and Personality

Abstract

Chatbots are one of the emerging intelligent systems which interact with customers to solve different queries in a wide range of domain areas. During social interaction, politeness plays a vital role in achieving effective communication. Consequently, it becomes essential to understand how a chatbot’s politeness affects user experience during the interaction. To understand it, we conducted a between-subject user study with two chatbots where one of the chatbots employs polite triggers, and the other one replies intending to answer the queries. To introduce politeness in normal chatbot responses, we used the state-of-the-art tag and generate approach. We first analyzed how different personality traits influence the response of individual persons to polite triggers. In addition, we also investigated the effects of polite triggers among different genders and age groups using a cross-sectional analysis.