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“Alexa, Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” Characterizing Playful Requests to Conversational Agents

Authors:

Alexander Libov,

Liane Lewin-Eytan,

Dafna ShahafAuthors Info & Claims

CHI EA '22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts

Article No.: 423, Pages 1 - 7

https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519870

Published: 28 April 2022 Publication History

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Abstract

Conversational Agents (CAs) such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are well-suited for task-oriented interactions (“Call Jason”), but other interaction types are often beyond their capabilities. One notable example is playful requests: for example, people ask their CAs personal questions (“What’s your favorite color?”) or joke with them, sometimes at their expense (“Find Nemo”). Failing to recognize playfulness causes user dissatisfaction and abandonment, destroying the precious rapport with the CA.

Today, playful CA behavior is achieved through manually curated replies to hard-coded questions. We take a step towards understanding and scaling playfulness by characterizing playful opportunities. To map the problem’s landscape, we draw inspiration from humor theories and analyze real user data. We present a taxonomy of playful requests and explore its prevalence in real Alexa traffic. We hope to inspire new avenues towards more human-like CAs.

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Index Terms

“Alexa, Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” Characterizing Playful Requests to Conversational Agents

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI EA '22: Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2022

3066 pages

ISBN:9781450391566

DOI:10.1145/3491101

Editors:
Simone Barbosa
PUC-Rio, Brazil
,
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan, USA
,
Caroline Appert
Université Paris-Saclay, France
,
David A. Shamma
Toyota Research Institute, USA

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Published: 28 April 2022

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Ermakova LBosser AMiller TThomas TPreciado VSidorov GJatowt A(2024)CLEF 2024 JOKER Lab: Automatic Humour AnalysisAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-56072-9_5(36-43)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2024
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