If You Ask Nicely

A Digital Assistant Rebuking Impolite Voice Commands

authored by

Michael Bonfert, Maximilian Spliethöver, Roman Arzaroli, Marvin Lange, Martin Hanci, Robert Porzel

Abstract

Digital home assistants have an increasing influence on our everyday lives. The media now reports how children adapt the consequential, imperious language style when talking to real people. As a response to this behavior, we considered a digital assistant rebuking impolite language. We then investigated how adult users react when being rebuked by the AI. In a between-group study (N = 20), the participants were being rejected by our fictional speech assistant “Eliza” when they made impolite requests. As a result, we observed more polite behavior. Most test subjects accepted the AI's demand and said “please” significantly more often. However, many participants retrospectively denied Eliza the entitlement to politeness and criticized her attitude or refusal of service.

External Organisation(s)

University of Bremen

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

95-102

No. of pages

8

Publication date

02.10.2018

Publication status

Published

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Hardware and Architecture, Computer Science Applications

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1145/3242969.3242995 (Access: Closed)