On the Design of and Interaction with Conversational Agents: An Organizing and Assessing Review of Human-Computer Interaction Research
Authors: Diederich, Stephan; Brendel, Alfred Benedikt; Morana, Stefan; Kolbe, Lutz
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2022)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00724
<jats:p>Conversational agents (CAs), described as software with which humans interact through natural language, have increasingly attracted interest in both academia and practice because of improved capabilities driven by advances in artificial intelligence and, specifically, natural language processing. CAs are used in contexts such as peoples private lives, education, and healthcare, as well as in organizations to innovate or automate tasks for example, in marketing, sales, or customer service. In addition to these application contexts, CAs take on different forms in terms of their embodiment, the communication mode, and their (often human-like) design. Despite their popularity, many CAs are unable to fulfill expectations, and fostering a positive user experience is challenging. To better understand how CAs can be designed to fulfill their intended purpose and how humans interact with them, a number of studies focusing on human-computer interaction have been carried out in recent years, which have contributed to our understanding of this technology. However, currently, a structured overview of this research is lacking, thus impeding the systematic identification of research gaps…