Apple study suggests chattier users prefer chattier AI assistants

How might you characterize the conversational style of a digital assistant like Siri? No matter your impression, it stands to reason that striking the wrong tone could dissuade users from engaging with it in the future. Perhaps that's why in a paper ("Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants") accepted to the Interspeech 2019 conference in Graz, Austria, researchers at Apple investigated a conversational assistant that considered users' preferred tones and mannerisms in its responses. They found that people's opinions of the assistant's likability and trustworthiness improved when it mirrored their degree of chattiness, and that the features necessary to perform the mirroring could be extracted from those people's speech patterns. "Long-term reliance on digital assistants requires a sense of trust in the assistant and its abilities. Therefore, strategies for building and maintaining this trust are required, especially as digital assistants become more advanced and operate in more aspects of people's lives," wrote the paper's coauthors.