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A major challenge in designing conversational agents is to handle unknown concepts in user utterances. This is particularly difficult for general-purpose task-oriented agents, as the unknown concepts and the tasks can be outside of the agent’s existing domain of knowledge. In this work, we propose a new multi-modal mixed-initiative approach towards this problem. Our agent Pumice guides the user to recursively explain unknown concepts through conversations, and to ground these concepts by demonstrating on the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of existing third-party mobile apps. Pumice also supports the generalization of learned concepts to other different contexts and task domains.
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Hey Google, Do You Have a Personality? Designing Personality and Personas for Conversational Agents
Conversational agents designed to interact through natural language are often imbued with human-like personalities. At times, the agent might also have a distinct persona with traits such as gender, age, or a backstory. Designing such personality or persona for conversational agents has become a common design practice. In this work, we review the emerging literature on designing agent persona or personality, and reflect on these approaches, along with the personas that are created for common conversational agents. We discuss open questions with regards to three aspects: meeting user needs, the ethics of deception, and reinforcing social stereotypes through conversational agents. We hope this work can provoke researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on their approach for designing personality or persona of conversational agents.
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- PAR ID:
- 10354963
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CUI 2021 - 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3469595.3469607
