What is Botsanality: the Definition of Bot Personality

How to give a bot personality? Does it need it at all? Should it be more funny or official, more emotional or dehumanized? Which personality will best suit your business? The answers to these questions should guide the design of your bot.

How to give a bot personality?

The personality of a bot is created by choosing:

• language
• tone
• style

It should be designed taking into account intuitiveness and comfort. It should be based on an analysis of the bot for User Experience, but not only. People draw conclusions on computer-generated voices and define their ‘behavior’ using the same principles and abbreviations they use while interacting with people. They analyze the bot’s reactions and then decide whether they want to interact with it. Users will therefore attribute personality to your bot, even if it has not been clearly stated.

Examples of bot personality

People loved Disney BB8 and Wall-e robots for their personalities. Val Head, Design Evangelist, UX Innovation in Adobe, has dealt with different chatbots but her favorite one is Digit. Apart from the fact that the bot teaches how to save money, it also responds to her with smiles, makes funny comments, and adds gifs.

Siri can beatbox and sing songs. Alexa can recite fragments of Shia Labeouf’s ‘Just Do It’. The Internet is flooded with stories of people who have experienced pleasant surprises in conversations with bots and voice assistants. Companies realize that the bot’s personality is important. In order for brands to get involved through bots and finally see conversions, they obviously need good quality conversations. Involvement and behavior in conversation interfaces, however, require from users an emotional connection with experience. The bot’s personality has a deep impact on the user and makes this interaction much more memorable.