Genie in the Bottle: Anthropomorphized Perceptions of Conversational Agents

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This paper presents a qualitative multi-phase study seeking to identify patterns in users' anthropomorphized perceptions of conversational agents. Through a comparative analysis of behavioral perceptions and visual conceptions of three agents — Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri — we first show that the perceptions of an agent's character are structured according to five categories: approachability, sentiment toward a user, professionalism, intelligence, and individuality. We then explore visualizations of the agents' appearance and discuss the specifics assigned to each agent. Finally, we analyze associative explanations for these perceptions. We demonstrate that the anthropomorphized behavioral and visual perceptions of agents yield structural consistency and discuss how these perceptions are linked with each other and system features.