How Should My Chatbot Interact? A Survey on Social Characteristics in Human–Chatbot Interaction Design

Chatbots’ growing popularity has brought new challenges to HCI, having changed the patterns of human interactions with computers. The increasing need to approximate conversational interaction styles raises expectations for chatbots to present social behaviors that are habitual in human–human communication. In this survey, we argue that chatbots should be enriched with social characteristics that cohere with users’ expectations, ultimately avoiding frustration and dissatisfaction. We bring together the literature on disembodied, text-based chatbots to derive a conceptual model of social characteristics for chatbots. We analyzed 56 papers from various domains to understand how social characteristics can benefit human–chatbot interactions and identify the challenges and strategies to designing them. Additionally, we discussed how characteristics may influence one another. Our results provide relevant opportunities to both researchers and designers to advance human–chatbot interactions.