It Takes a Village: Integrating an Adaptive Chatbot into an Online Gaming Community

DOI

While the majority of research in chatbot design has focused on creating chatbots that engage with users one-on-one, less work has focused on the design of conversational agents for online communities. In this paper we present results from a three week test of a social chatbot in an established online community. During this study, the chatbot "grew up" from "birth" through its teenage years, engaging with community members and "learning" vocabulary from their conversations. We discuss the design of this chatbot, how users' interactions with it evolved over the course of the study, and how it impacted the community as a whole. We discuss how we addressed challenges in developing a chatbot whose vocabulary could be shaped by users, and conclude with implications for the role of machine learning in social interactions in online communities and potential future directions for design of community-based chatbots.