Chatting up an Automated Vehicle: Does a Text-based Chatbot Bring Back the Human Element into the Travel Experience?

Increased automation in public transportation bears the potential of a decreased human component when interacting with them. One possibility to include this human component might be through the use of chat-like interaction. In this paper, we investigated the effects of a chat-interface in a ticket booking app for automated shuttles. We report the results from a laboratory study, in which we compared two app designs, one with and one without a chat-interface. We found that, contrary to what we had expected based on the literature, there was no difference regarding productivity between the two. We observed a generally negative effect of the presence of a chat-interface, suggesting a slight preference towards no chat-interface overall. This suggests less suitability of such interfaces, at least for the ticket booking process, for automated public shuttles.