The Wizard of Curiosities: Enriching Dialogues with Fun Facts

TL;DR

This paper explores enriching dialogues with curated fun facts in cooking and DIY domains, demonstrating that such curiosities enhance user engagement and improve overall user ratings in conversational agents.

Contribution

It introduces a curated set of curiosities for dialogue systems and evaluates their impact in real-world multimodal conversations, showing measurable improvements.

Findings

Curiosities increase user engagement.

Average rating improves by 9.7%.

Effective in multimodal, multi-turn conversations.

Abstract

Introducing curiosities in a conversation is a way to teach something new to the person in a pleasant and enjoyable way. Enriching dialogues with contextualized curiosities can improve the users' perception of a dialog system and their overall user experience. In this paper, we introduce a set of curated curiosities, targeting dialogues in the cooking and DIY domains. In particular, we use real human-agent conversations collected in the context of the Amazon Alexa TaskBot challenge, a multimodal and multi-turn conversational setting. According to an A/B test with over 1000 conversations, curiosities not only increase user engagement, but provide an average relative rating improvement of 9.7%.