Chatting About Data - Interacting with Voice Interfaces to Engage with Election Panel Data

The importance of data is increasing and so is the use of voice-interface-chatbots. While tasks that can be handled by chatbots are still relatively simple, analysing data can be a difficult task for non-experts. The aim of the research was to show how an interaction with a voice-interface-chatbot to explore data can work. In a preliminary study we investigated what questions are asked by people when looking at tabular data. We then conducted a Wizard of Oz study with a voice-interface-chatbot that can answer questions about the National Council elections with text or graphs. In 15 interviews 1235 messages were exchanged, of which 159 were categorized as information requests. Our study shows that conversational interfaces should have the ability to include past conversation history in the evaluation of questions in order to encourage user engagement. We present a typology of questions and provide in-depth insights to inform the development of chatbots for human data interaction.