Having a laugh? Humor and chatbot user experience design
Chatbots and conversational computing present many user experience design challenges: humor, for example. And that’s before even considering if the content was funny, to begin with. Luckily, we still have humans with interests in dramatic arts around. For now.
Joking about user experience
“Are there any Scottish people in the audience?”
Always a great start to a conference session. One person shouted, “You’re going to show that Scottish Elevator Voice UI video, right?”
Nope.
Instead, I used the top jokes from the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as the opener to my workshop at ConverCon 18 on the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Personality, and Conversational Interfaces.
Of course, humor is a dimension of human personality and therefore part of that natural, conversational human and machine dialog. But, humor has been called the final barrier for AI for good reason; there are many challenges.
Culture and context
I began my ConverCon workshop by telling what was voted best joke from the Fringe.
“Working at the Jobcentre has to be a tense job — knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.”
As soon as I recited the joke, I suddenly realised that it might not be that funny to my global audience. Did they know what a “Jobcentre” is? It’s a British public service. In Ireland, the equivalent service, an Intreo Centre, is part of the Department of Work Affairs and Social Protection. In the U.S., it might be called a WorkForce Center or One-Stop Center.
Conversational UX: No laughing matter
I continued to show a few real challenges of chatbot personality and AI, using U.S. English examples. Take this processing message from the Meekan scheduling bot on Slack. It makes a ‘witty’ reference to hacking into TSA servers and “No Fly Lists”. Now, I know what the TSA and No Fly Lists are, and I still don’t find it funny.
The Secret to Comedy is in the Data
Humor is not only that final frontier for AI, but a human personality trait that is easily lost in translation. Even in the original language, it’s not always that funny to a native audience. Of course, you don’t have to be Geert Hofstede to realize that humor doesn’t travel across culture, but machines don’t get that, yet.
If the secret to human comedy is timing, then the secret to AI comedy must be in the data. Humor does have a place in conversational interaction, even in the most seemingly unlikely of engagements, for example, with Woebot. But humor needs to be done right, and that takes a human touch to either write or localize that humor creatively, as well as a technology that understands when and where to crack that joke (i.e., the context).
All the major players in the conversational computing space offer AI and personality-based design and build solutions and continue to innovate. Take Microsoft’s Project Personality Chat (check out the humor demo option) or Microsoft Azure Bot Service with its customizable editorial library, for example. Or, look at Google Dialogflow and its pre-built customizable agent personas and “small talk” options. Then, there’s the Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and AVS UX Attention System. Notice how these personality-based libraries, snippets, and guidance are editable, configurable, and require the enhancement skills of humans? All chatbot user experiences, humorous, personality-driven ones included, must still be designed.
So, as tech startups and the industry rise to the challenge of how to design with AI, personality, humor, and a principle that no UI is the best UI of all, it makes sense that new talents and skills will emerge and flourish to ensure that the conversational-based user experience will resonate with local audiences.
Chatbot design and development teams will need to look to the media, performing arts, or even comedy improvs for people who can get that local interaction just right. That’s no joke! It is very telling that Google Home was judged to have the most “engaging” experience because of dialog written by a former Pixar employee who was also behind that animation studio’s rules of storytelling.
Your punchline?
You may have other examples of humor and personality-based user experience challenges from the world of AI and conversational interaction. Feel free to share how you’d solve them!
(The ConverCon 18 presentation, including examples of the AI, personality, humor, and cultural challenges and a process for designing such conversational interfaces is available online.)
Ultan Ó Broin (@ultan) is a digital transformation consultant. With a successful track record of digital implementation success in Silicon Valley and EMEA, Ultan’s also a member of the editorial board of MultiLingual.
