StockBabble: A Conversational Financial Agent to support Stock Market Investors
This is an incremental application of conversational agents to assist retail investors with financial information and engagement.
The authors tackled the problem of supporting retail investors in understanding the stock market by developing StockBabble, a conversational agent that provides financial information and tools, resulting in 73% of users feeling more confident in investing and all participants willing to recommend it.
We introduce StockBabble, a conversational agent designed to support understanding and engagement with the stock market. StockBabble's value and novelty is in its ability to empower retail investors -- many of which may be new to investing -- and supplement their informational needs using a user-friendly agent. Users have the ability to query information on companies to retrieve a general and financial overview of a stock, including accessing the latest news and trading recommendations. They can also request charts which contain live prices and technical investment indicators, and add shares to a personal portfolio to allow performance monitoring over time. To evaluate our agent's potential, we conducted a user study with 15 participants. In total, 73% (11/15) of respondents said that they felt more confident in investing after using StockBabble, and all 15 would consider recommending it to others. These results are encouraging and suggest a wider appeal for such agents. Moreover, we believe this research can help to inform the design and development of future intelligent, financial personal assistants.