Chatbots with Social Skills Will Convince You to Buy Something

If a computer uses small talk in the wrong context, it will not only be less effective but downright jarring. She and her students have studied many different kinds of human interactions to understand the components that might be captured and encoded into machines, most recently annotating the behavior of high school students teaching each other algebra.

Although Cassell has been studying ways for machines to mimic conversational rapport for more than a decade, she says corporate researchers have only recently shown an interest in her work. In fact, one big company, which she declined to name, recently offered to buy the patents behind Sara, she says.

The techniques Cassell and others are honing could prove especially important as virtual helpers take on more responsibility for guiding the way we find information and shaping our purchasing habits. Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and others see chatbots as a promising new interface for reaching customers (see “Here Come the Marketing Chatbots”).

Some of the more polished virtual helpers out there, like Siri, already make use of some subtle social cues (see “Social Intelligence”). Earlier this year, Apple bought a company called Emotient, which is developing technology for tracking people’s emotions. That may signal an intention to improve Siri’s emotional intelligence.

Meanwhile, sources familiar with Amazon’s research say the company is investigating ways of making Alexa, the virtual assistant in its Echo voice-controlled device, more attuned to users’ emotional states as expressed through their tone and manner of speech (see “Amazon Working on Making Alexa Recognize Your Emotions”). Obviously, Amazon’s device is also designed with one eye on enabling online purchases, so it isn’t hard to imagine Alexa developing an artful sales patter.

There are challenges to making it work in any practical way. Timothy Bickmore, a professor at Northeastern University, says one of the biggest is capturing all the different cues that may be relevant to an interaction, including facial expressions and body language. This may be especially tricky on mobile devices, although in theory a smartphone could capture the information used to enable something like Sara. And he says the approach isn’t much help if an interface is just meant to execute a command as quickly and efficiently as possible. “Those cues are most useful in a natural conversation,” he says. “Sometimes the social stuff just gets in the way.”

Sara, at least, seemed pretty useful as a conference helper. Earlier this year, Cassell and her students took Sara to an event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, where it helped attendees meet people. And she says an as-yet-unpublished study shows that Sara is more effective at getting someone to click on a link when the agent applies its conversational strategies. That kind of human-to-machine relationship-building may be a sign of things to come.

“My goal is to build a device that can spend a lifetime with you, and over time its behavior will change,” Cassell says. “If, over five years, it is speaking to you in the same way that it did on the day you bought it, then you’re going to feel like you have a device with amnesia—or even worse, one that doesn’t care about you.”

>>81326
> more useful chatbots
I don't see how chatbots are in any way useful exept in deceiving People. The only Ones I can imagine Profiting from chatbots are mischievous Companies/Advertisers and Political Parties.

<Alex Jones Rant> THEY PUT BOTS IN OUR CHATS TO TURN THE FREAKIN YOUTH GAY.

>>81326
I'm one to quickly recognize advertising, and shut it out unless it's something I actually need. Advertising has got us all on the run.

Advertisers discovering new ways to try to trick and deceive people and then they wonder why everyone is using Adblockers now.

this research will be great for sexbots!

>>81326
This is actually already a thing with dating site bots. They used to go off a predetermined script but now they will change their answers based on yours.

>>81373
Waifubots when

>>81401
We 'Her' now?