Social and Emotional Etiquette of Chatbots: A Qualitative Approach to Understanding User Needs and Expectations

As chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, we often wonder what users perceive as natural and socially accepted manners of interacting with them. Some researchers maintain that humans should avoid engaging in emotional conversations with chatbots, while others have started building empathetic chatting machines using the latest deep learning techniques. To understand if chatbots should comprehend and display emotions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 participants. Our analysis revealed their overall enthusiasm towards emotionally aware agents. More importantly, users' intention to accept emotional chatbots seem to hinge on how these agents respond to our specific emotions, rather than just the ability to detect human emotions. Our findings also disclosed the specific application domains where emotionally intelligent technology could improve user experience. To conclude, we summarized a set of emotion interaction patterns that inspire users' intention to adopt such technology as well as guidelines useful for the development of emotionally intelligent chatbots.