The Trouble with Chatbots: social skills in a social world

This paper argues that social intelligence is a critical component of any conversational agent. Conver-sational interfaces with a sense of social identity circumvent several of problems that commonly arise, and such agents can promote ease-of-use, encourage engagement, and naturally set limits. The paper explores these issues by retrospectively analysing two sets of wizard-of-Oz experiments in the light of the social intelligence concept. In these experiments, the wizards employed simple social strategies to deal with ‘difficult ’ situations, and these are examined and expanded to general principles. Embracing the idea that a conversational agent is a social actor will, we believe, result in interfaces that participate seamlessly in our human world of social relations.