Manipulating and Evaluating Levels of Personality Perceptions of Voice Assistants through Enactment-Based Dialogue Design.

We present an enactment-based dialogue design approach to imbue voice assistants with different levels of personality. In two focus groups, we asked amateur actors to animate different voice assistant personalities by writing and enacting dialogues between a voice assistant and a user. We realised the resulting dialogues using Amazon Alexa and presented them to N=156 participants in an online survey to investigate whether the personality levels were successfully synthesised and if user personality influences the preference for specific personality levels. Our results indicate that participants ranked the personality levels as intended but that high personality levels were perceived as less pronounced than expected. Furthermore, we found a small relationship between extraversion and a preference for a voice assistant that is social-entertaining whilst conscientious participants tended to reject a confrontational voice assistant. We discuss implications for researchers and practitioners on how to manipulate voice assistant personalities and adapt them to users.