An artificial
personality (AP) is a collection of characteristics, tendencies and
behavioral quirks assigned to a chatbot, digital assistant, robot or video game
character. A primary goal of adding personality to digital entities is to
encourage end users to interact with programming on an emotional, as well as a
logical, level.
Personalities are
especially significant for voice-activated digital assistants such as Apple's
Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana because they are
intended to take the place of human assistants. Google has hired a creative
team to give its unnamed assistant personality, while Siri was purposely
designed early on to be a little sassy. Cortana was modeled after real-life celebrity
personal assistants and Alexa now offers a skill that allows her to be
disrespectful.
People don't expect
their digital assistant to pass the Turing test and be mistaken for a human
being, but developers have found that the addition of personality quirks is
something end users seem to appreciate. Typically, humor is used to redirect
the user's attention from programming deficiencies.
While the ability of
an AP to whisper, pause for emphasis or adjust pitch has allowed the program to
seem more conversational, designers actually have to be careful not to make the
personality seem too human and create an effect known as "uncanny
valley." The effect is named for the way the viewer's level of comfort
drops as a simulation comes close to, but does not quite reach, realism.
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