Do you need to give a personality and name for your bot?
Personality is one of the key attributes that can differentiate your bot from other bots that provide a similar service. Personality is like the color scheme of an app or the soundtrack of a movie — something that can provide consistency across the experience and indicate to the users what type of bot they are working with.
Bots, irrespective of the form, gives the opportunity to make products feel human. Steve Jobs understood very early on that people build relationships with their devices. Voice assistants could infuse more intimacy and humanity into our electronics and mark the early stages of ubiquitous computing. What we’re seeing now is a moment in time, but also the beginning of a new way of people engaging in technology.
Voice assistants could infuse more intimacy and humanity into our electronics and mark the early stages of ubiquitous computing. What we’re seeing now is a moment in time, but also the beginning of a new way of people engaging in technology.
Anthropomorphism and personification play a strong role here. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, and intentions to non-human entities.
Humans throughout history from the earliest cave paintings to our most modern movies we have assigned anthropomorphism to inanimate and animate objects.
Whether it is Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, they all naturally have a clear anthropomorphism and personality. Clearly, Siri has a more nuanced personality but Alexa most recently has been adding dimension to her personality.
With the earliest voice systems, it was natural to assign a human name and, therefore, a human personality to a chatbot.
Google stated, during Google IO 2016 they made a conscious choice to not give the new Voice First device, Google Home a human-like name. Google Home is activated by saying “Ok Google” or “Google”. They reasoned that the voice service they created has already been used across Google products should remain:
- Genderless
- Have no overt personality
- Have no obvious country of origin
It is natural to assign a human name and, therefore, a human personality to a chatbot. Once you have defined a personality, it is important to keep it consistent across the experience. This gives the users the feeling that they are dealing with a cohesive service (or a persona), which in turn improves trust and engagement.