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How Human Communication Influences Virtual Personal Assistants

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Knowledge in the Information Society (PCSF 2020, CSIS 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 184))

Abstract

Virtual Personal Assistants (VPI) are becoming part of our daily lives. The possibility of voice communication marks a new stage in the development of the interaction between people and computers. New challenges are associated not only with security issues and lack of the VPIs ability to give relevant answers to critical questions but also with the fact that the new artificial interlocutor does not always meet people’s expectations. The article discusses how the answers to the tricky questions of the virtual assistant Alice have been changing from the moment of its creation in 2017 to 2020. It was revealed that Alice not only developed the ability to respond to questions more correctly and avoid problematic topics (including those that could offend a human interlocutor), but also became more “modest” and less gender-oriented. Alice’s small talk and answers to personal questions have changed, thus the VPI hesitates to express her own opinion and make free jokes, begins to make excuses, and promises to improve, which was not observed earlier.

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Acknowledgement

This paper was financially supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation on the program to improve the competitiveness of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) among the world’s leading research and education centers in 2016–2020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU), Polytechnicheskaya, 29, 195251, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

    Daria Bylieva, Victoria Lobatyuk, Dmitry Kuznetsov & Natalia Anosova

Authors
  1. Daria Bylieva
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  2. Victoria Lobatyuk
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  3. Dmitry Kuznetsov
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  4. Natalia Anosova
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daria Bylieva .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnique, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Daria Bylieva

  2. Institut für Philosophie, Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany

    Alfred Nordmann

  3. Department of Social Sciences, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnique, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olga Shipunova

  4. Department of High School of Cyberphysical Systems and Control, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnique, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Violetta Volkova

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Bylieva, D., Lobatyuk, V., Kuznetsov, D., Anosova, N. (2021). How Human Communication Influences Virtual Personal Assistants. In: Bylieva, D., Nordmann, A., Shipunova, O., Volkova, V. (eds) Knowledge in the Information Society. PCSF CSIS 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 184. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65857-1_11

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