This study reports the results of a laboratory experiment exploring interactions between humans and a conversational agent. Using the ChatScript language, we created a chat bot that asked participants to describe a series of images. The two objectives of this study were (1) to analyze the impact of dynamic responses on participants’ perceptions of the conversational agent, and (2) to explore be...

We use speech shadowing to create situations wherein people converse in person with a human whose words are determined by a conversational agent computer program. Speech shadowing involves a person (the shadower) repeating vocal stimuli originating from a separate communication source in real-time. Humans shadowing for conversational agent sources (e.g., chat bots) become hybrid agents ("echobo...

When trying to identify the author of a book, a paper, or a letter, the object is to detect a style that distinguishes one author from another. With recent developments in artificial intelligence, chat bots sometimes play the role of the text authors. The focus of this study is to investigate the change in chat bot linguistic style over time and its effect on authorship attribution. The study s...

We build a chat bot with iterative content exploration that leads a user through a personalized knowledge acquisition session. The chat bot is designed as an automated customer support or product recommendation agent assisting a user in learning product features, product usability, suitability, troubleshooting and other related tasks. To control the user navigation through content, we extend th...

The aim of this work is to investigate the effectiveness of novel human-machine interaction paradigms for eHealth applications. In particular, we propose to replace usual human-machine interaction mechanisms with an approach that leverages a chat-bot program, opportunely designed and trained in order to act and interact with patients as a human being. Moreover, we have validated the proposed in...

The abuse of chat services by automated programs, known as chat bots, poses a serious threat to Internet users. Chat bots target popular chat networks to distribute spam and malware. In this paper, we first conduct a series of measurements on a large commercial chat network. Our measurements capture a total of 14 different types of chat bots ranging from simple to advanced. Moreover, we observe...