Table 1 Characteristics of AI chatbots... | Emerald Publishing

Table 1

Characteristics of AI chatbots

Design dimension	Chatbots’ characteristic(s)	Definition	References
Function	Natural language processing	The ability of an AI chatbot to communicate in a human-like manner	Lebeuf et al. (2019), Meyer von Wolff et al. (2019)
Function	Learning agent	The ability of an AI chatbot to learn from a user’s input. This relies on the machine learning incorporated into the chatbot’s architecture. The learning may be supervised, reinforced or unsupervised	Benbya et al. (2020), McTear (2017)
Form	Conversational interaction	Interactive two-way communication. The performance of an AI chatbot’s actions can be user-driven (reactive) or chatbot-driven (proactive or autonomous)	Chaves and Gerosa (2021), Gnewuch et al. (2017)
	Social presence	The feeling of virtual togetherness or “being with another” (Biocca et al., 2003) and the ability to react to human queries, which is likely to be influenced by the anthropomorphic interface components	Biocca et al. (2003), Qiu and Benbasat (2009), Toader et al. (2020)
	Embodiment	AI chatbots could have virtual or physical representation or could be disembodied	Araujo (2018), Diederich et al. (2019)

Design dimension	Chatbots’ characteristic(s)	Definition	References
Function	Natural language processing	The ability of an AI chatbot to communicate in a human-like manner	Lebeuf et al. (2019), Meyer von Wolff et al. (2019)
Function	Learning agent	The ability of an AI chatbot to learn from a user’s input. This relies on the machine learning incorporated into the chatbot’s architecture. The learning may be supervised, reinforced or unsupervised	Benbya et al. (2020), McTear (2017)
Form	Conversational interaction	Interactive two-way communication. The performance of an AI chatbot’s actions can be user-driven (reactive) or chatbot-driven (proactive or autonomous)	Chaves and Gerosa (2021), Gnewuch et al. (2017)
	Social presence	The feeling of virtual togetherness or “being with another” (Biocca et al., 2003) and the ability to react to human queries, which is likely to be influenced by the anthropomorphic interface components	Biocca et al. (2003), Qiu and Benbasat (2009), Toader et al. (2020)
	Embodiment	AI chatbots could have virtual or physical representation or could be disembodied	Araujo (2018), Diederich et al. (2019)