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.

We have come to the fifth month of the year, and technology especially the disruptive one that includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining strong-hold more than ever. Understanding its disruptive factors is important as it enables more accurate forecasting and better planning for civil society, policymakers and businesses. Identifying the main levers that drive the growth of AI applications can help to expedite the many positive use cases in the pipeline; like optimised renewable energy distribution at scale and Machine Learning disease diagnosis systems in healthcare. So how are the disruptive technologies redefining businesses sphere? Over the years, it is been seen that AI adaptability is increasing.

More than 30% said their companies have allocated $50 million or more to smart automation projects, and more than half have already spent at least $10 million; the initiatives include various combinations of robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing and analytics; highest expenditure levels were for the finance and accounting category, marked by 23% of respondents as receiving investment of slightly more than US$50 million; the technology that organizations are experimenting with or piloting the most is AI (36); 30% of companies are opting not to invest or are unsure of their plans for smart automation (KPMG Easing the Pressure Points). Lawyers surveyed think AI will be valuable for tracking billable time (53% of US layers, 49% of UK lawyers), conflicts clearance (43% and 41%), and compliance with client billing documents (34% for both US and UK lawyers) (Intapp survey reveals lawyers' attitudes toward technology). The portion of auto companies not using or testing AI rose to 39% in 2019 from 26% in 2017 (Capgemini). "The accelerated growth of RPA is being driven by high levels of efficiency and productivity that can now be achieved from intelligent automation, which combines advanced RPA, artificial intelligence and embedded analytics. The demand for RPA solutions has surged as legacy companies are now competing with'digital native' companies like Amazon and Uber, in which nearly every part of the business is completely automated"--Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere Inc., an RPA maker that expects to deploy three million software robots at organizations worldwide by 2020, a 200% increase from today (Wall Street Journal).

We describe experiments towards building a conversational digital assistant that considers the preferred conversational style of the user. In particular, these experiments are designed to measure whether users prefer and trust an assistant whose conversational style matches their own. To this end we conducted a user study where subjects interacted with a digital assistant that responded in a way that either matched their conversational style, or did not. Using self-reported personality attributes and subjects' feedback on the interactions, we built models that can reliably predict a user's preferred conversational style.