How to design a compelling personality for a chatbot?

Personality is a key to a successful bot.

It helps you to provide a better conversational experience, saves you when the bot doesn’t understand something and can differentiate your product from other bots with the similar service.

Here are 6 things to consider when designing a personality:

1. Environment
Consider whether the target environment is a work environment or a consumer environment, and what social attributes are acceptable for a personality in this environment. For example, having a personality that is very humoristic might not be the right choice for a legal assistant bot.
2. Audience
Consider the type of audience who will be the primary users of your bot (hint: everyone is never the right audience type, even for Google). A bot that talks in slang might not be the right fit for a more conservative audience and a bot that uses too many three-letter acronyms might miss the mark for others, IMO.
3. Jobs to be done
The task the user is intending to execute implies different personality characteristics, even for what initially might seem like similar tasks. Buying a guitar might require a totally different bot personality than buying healthcare insurance.
4. Runtime variations
This is slightly more complex, as it might require some logic associated with the bot, but personality might be context-driven. It is OK to be whimsical when sending directions to a party, but less so when sending directions to a work meeting to which the user is already late.
5. Locally relevant social acceptance
Some cultures are different than others. Referring to someone as “dear” might be fine in one place in the world while being culturally unacceptable in another place.
6. Existing branding
Many brands feel very strongly about the personality their brand exposes. Slack, for example, wants to expose an empathetic, friendly, and pleasant personality.
7. Values
At the end of the day, the bot’s personality is an extension of the service you want to expose. Think about the core values of the service, as that can imply a certain type of personality.

P.S. I highly recommend everyone who wants to dive more into this topic to read Designing Bots book from Amir Shevat. It's a 🤖 bible.