A Framework of Personality Cues for Conversational Agents

Conversational agents (CAs)—software systems emulating conversations with humans through natural language—reshape our communication environment. As CAs have been widely used for applications requiring human-like interactions, a key goal in information systems (IS) research and practice is to be able to create CAs that exhibit a particular personality. However, existing research on CA personality is scattered across different fields and researchers and practitioners face difficulty in understanding the current state of the art on the design of CA personality. To address this gap, we systematically analyze existing studies and develop a framework on how to imbue CAs with personality cues and how to organize the underlying range of expressive variation regarding the Big Five personality traits. Our framework contributes to IS research by providing an overview of CA personality cues in verbal and non-verbal language and supports practitioners in designing CAs with a particular personality.