Personality Perceptions of Conversational Agents: A Task-Based Analysis Using Thai as the Conversational Language

Recently there has been a tremendous growth in the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) based conversational agents (CA). Their support for anthropomorphism and human-likeness makes them popular. However, being anthropomorphic raises a question – do these agents have a personality? Moreover, what effect may personality have on the different tasks these agents perform? Through this research, we aim to answer these two questions by focusing on Thai as the communication modality between the users and the CAs. We use a multi-model approach involving human, brand, and website personality frameworks for proposing our CA personality model. We use a series of steps right from creating the initial pool of personality traits to the final set of personality traits through a systematic approach. Our proposed personality model has 7 dimensions across the two-dimensional continuum (calm – neuroticism, maturity – juvenility, intelligence – ineptness, openness – reserved, sociability – seclusion, self-control – instability, and aesthetics – unaesthetics). For examining the effect of personality type on the nature of tasks, we identified two primary task categories (social and functional) and used a multi-criteria decision-making approach to examine the corresponding impacts. Social tasks are impacted most from the (maturity – juvenility) dimension, whereas functional tasks are mostly impacted from the (intelligence – ineptness) dimension. Based on the results we provide suitable recommendations for future research.