The effect of emojis when interacting with conversational interface assisted health coaching system

The recent rise of conversational interfaces have made it possible to integrate this technology into various domains, among which is health. Dialogue systems and conversational agents can bring a lot into healthcare to reduce cost, increase efficiency and provide continuing care, albeit its infancy and complexity about building natural dialogues. However, the design guidelines to design dialogues for conversational agents are usually based on common knowledge, and less frequently on empirical evidence. For example, the use of emojis in conversational agent dialogues is still a debated issue, and the added value of adding such graphical elements is mainly anecdotal. In this work, we present an empirical study comparing users feedback when interacting with chatbot applications that use different dialogue styles, i.e., plain text or text with emoji, when asking different health related questions. The analysis found that when participants had to score an interaction with a chatbot that asks personal questions on their mental wellbeing, they rated the interaction with higher scores with respect to enjoyment, attitude and confidence. Differently, participants rated with lower scores a chatbot that uses emojis when asking information on their physical wellbeing compared to a dialogue with plain text. We believe this work can contribute to the research on integrating conversational agents in the health and wellbeing context and can serve as a guidance in the design and development of interfaces for text-based dialogue systems.