Towards Teams Being Led by a Conversational Agent

DOI

Rapid advances in conversational agents are making it possible for them to lead human teams. However, considerably less is known about how human teams perform under their guidance. To investigate this, we devised a Wizard-of-Oz study where teams of 3 participants (ground players) were tasked with locating and corralling targets in a virtual desert environment. A fourth player (operator), had access to a top-down map view of the task environment. Importantly, the operator could solely provide oral guidance to the ground players on the task. In half of the trials, participants were led by a human operator, whereas in the other half of the trials they were led by a conversational agent whose responses were controlled by the same human operator (Wizard). Although teams led by the human operator communicated significantly more and ground players preferred the human operator, no differences in team performance were observed.