Designing a Chatbot Social Cue Configuration System

Social cues (e.g., gender, age) are important design features of chatbots. However, choosing a social cue design is challenging. Although much research has empirically investigated social cues, chatbot engineers have difficulties to access this knowledge. Descriptive knowledge is usually embedded in research articles and difficult to apply as prescriptive knowledge. To address this challenge, we propose a chatbot social cue configuration system that supports chatbot engineers to access descriptive knowledge in order to make justified social cue design decisions (i.e., grounded in empirical research). We derive two design principles that describe how to extract and transform descriptive knowledge into a prescriptive and machine-executable representation. In addition, we evaluate the prototypical instantiations in an exploratory focus group and at two practitioner symposia. Our research addresses a contemporary problem and contributes with a generalizable concept to support researchers as well as practitioners to leverage existing descriptive knowledge in the design of artifacts.