From Prototypr.io:
Conversational interfaces have reduced user experience down to a few lines of text. With bots, UX becomes conversational, products talk back, and personas now go both ways. Every bot has a voice — which means every bot needs a personality.
If conversational computing means personality is the new user experience, how do we approach the design of these nuanced digital entities?
. . . .
Chatbots and voice assistants are for humans. Conversational interfaces exist for better interactions between humans and computers. So then, how can we personalise these conversations to be more life-like, intimate, and representative of human interaction? Through personality. Building a rich and detailed personality makes your chatbot more relatable, believable, and relevant to your users.
Investing in personality informs every touch point of a chatbot. Personality creates a deeper understanding of the bot’s end goal, and how it will communicate through choice of language, mood, tone, and style. Seeing a bot as a lifeless piece of technology is a mistake. People project human traits onto everything — but now these objects talk back. Whether you like it or not, your users will still assign a personality to your bot if one hasn’t been explicitly designed.
Link to the rest at Prototypr.io
PG says Alexa definitely has a personality. However, he’s not certain whether she has moods or not.
Here comes Clippy!
We’ve come to expect very little personality from our computers (see Windows 95). That’s changing with modern web and mobile apps.
But I wonder how much personality users will really want, long-term, from their conversational interfaces. There’s a fine line between delightful and irritating (remember Clippy?). Sometimes what was fun the first couple times becomes annoying later.
I think the ability to customise your Automated Personal Assistants is vital. Aspects which should be user customisable include:
1. Voice: male/female/accent
2. Snarkiness vs Obsequiousness
3. Seriousness vs humorous
I envision a range of sliders for these to balance it out.
Based on my recent reading I think Lindsay Buroker would crank the humour and snark up to 11 🙂 (I hope thats not inappropriate to say)