Interacting with a Salesman Chatbot

In recent years, chatbots have been spreading on social networks and brand websites, and interactions between users and commercial chatbots have become an ordinary experience in the range of human-computer interactions. Yet, whereas automated conversation has been analyzed in various experimental contexts, only a few studies describe real-world interactions with voicebots [1‐3] or chatbots [4‐6]. How do interactions with chatbots actually take place? What is an AI-driven commercial conversation in practice? To address these questions, we conducted a sociological study of interactions with chatbots, based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of interaction logs with a vending chatbot, deployed on a French online telecom company. The study relies on a dataset of 9 months of ComBot usage logs in 2019, representing roughly 47,000 interaction sessions. Our analysis shows that interactions with the commercial chatbot are a highly hybrid format between click-based interfaces and conversational interactions. A majority of users mobilize the conventions of commercial conversation to express their need in plain text. However, the rest of the dialogue mainly combines response-buttons, short input text, and hyperlinks. The use of politeness shows that users are keen on following the conversational interaction format offered to them, even if they don’t use it entirely.