Should Conversational User interfaces have a personality - Saul Albert/Cathy Pearl/Elizabeth Stokoe

While it is well-established that conversational user interfaces (CUIs) can be designed for different user ‘personas’, or themselves are designed to have a ‘personality’ - both with recognizable tones of voice - we take a different starting point in this session to explore what conversation analysts refer to as ‘recipient design.’
‘Recipient design’ captures the findings over decades of research that, in human-human interaction, people design, word by word, gesture by gesture, and even breath by breath, every turn they take for the person(s) they are interacting with. For example, the design of an apparently simple “request for email address” nevertheless varies according to the experience, knowledge, and resources that one party has deduced about the other over the course of a conversation.
We consider how insights from research on recipient design may aid CUI design. We ask whether personas risk the production of static CUIs that can become literally mono-tonous, as well as become reductive, with the risk of creating bias or reproducing harmful stereotypes. We show why it is worth leveraging the principles of ‘recipient design’ and provide some practical ways to do this.