The Persuasive Power of Human-Machine Dialogue
Abstract
The persuasive power of live interaction is hard to match, yet technologies are increasingly taking on roles to promote behavioral change. We believe that speech-based interfaces offer a compelling mode of interaction for engaging users and are motivated to understand how to best present persuasive information using speech interaction. We present a study comparing the persuasive power of two speech-based information systems, one which uses a recorded message-based lecture presentation and another which uses an interactive dialogic presentation. We measure the persuasive power across both conditions using a survival task. We find that the dialogic system is significantly more persuasive than the lecture system. We also find that the dialogic system presents signifi- cantly (almost four times) less information than the lecture system. We analyze our results using three standard rank correlation methods. We point to limitations of these measures and propose a new metric which appears to be more sensitive for this task.