Help! Is my Chatbot Falling into the Uncanny Valley? : An Empirical Study of User Experience in Human-Chatbot Interaction

Original article available at http://dx.doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.201902201607 Advances in artificial intelligence strengthen chatbots’ ability to resemble human conversational agents. For some application areas, it may be tempting not to be transparent regarding a conversational agent’s nature as chatbot or human. However, the uncanny valley theory suggests that such lack in transparency may cause uneasy feelings in the user. In this study, we combined quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate this issue. First, we used a 2 x 2 experimental research design (n = 28) to investigate effects of lack in transparency on the perceived pleasantness of the conversation in addition to percei…