EcoBot : study design and development of a persuasive FSM-free Chatbot for energy saving

Sammanfattning: This study presents the development and evaluation of a conversational agent, EcoBot, designed to inform users about their energy habits and persuade them to save more energy when at home, to help fight climate change and energy waste. To reach this goal, three persuasion strategies were first identified: Feedback, to give users personalized suggestions based on their habits, Goal Setting, to set and track consumption goals for the user’s domestic appliances, and Social Comparison, to compare the user’s consumption with that of others. While developing the chatbot, an advanced context system was used to improve the user experience by reducing the amount of information the user has to provide in input and allowing the chatbot to switch between the strategies seamlessly. Furthermore, it was decided not to use an FSM to manage the flow of the conversation to allow a quick change of context without forcing the conversation in a single direction and to have greater flexibility in future EcoBot development. The chatbot was implemented using an NLP library and its functionalities have been modeled with a set of independent intents. After the design and development, an evaluation phase was conducted with 29 users, half of whom used as a comparison a reduced version of EcoBot (capable only of providing generic feedback) while the other half used the complete version. Although the experiment did not demonstrate greater effectiveness in convincing users to save more energy in the complete version of EcoBot, it was evident that it had greater user satisfaction and a better overall experience. This result is crucial for designing pleasant persuasive systems for users to use in the future. Future work will focus on increasing the accuracy of responses and the number of EcoBot features and conducting a longer and more realistic experiment to test the effectiveness of EcoBot in convincing users to save more energy.