From Assistants to Friends: Investigating Emotional Intelligence of IPAs in Hindi and English
This work addresses the need for culturally and linguistically appropriate emotional intelligence in IPAs, particularly for Indian language users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing research with new criteria.
The study measured the emotional intelligence (EI) of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) like Google Assistant in Hindi and English by evaluating responses to sadness and humor queries, finding that EI in Hindi is comparable to English with features like voice modulation and emojis, but IPAs often fail to respond intelligently or offer problematic answers.
Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant are increasingly becoming a part of our everyday. As IPAs become ubiquitous and their applications expand, users turn to them for not just routine tasks, but also intelligent conversations. In this study, we measure the emotional intelligence (EI) displayed by IPAs in the English and Hindi languages; to our knowledge, this is a pioneering effort in probing the emotional intelligence of IPAs in Indian languages. We pose utterances that convey the Sadness or Humor emotion and evaluate IPA responses. We build on previous research to propose a quantitative and qualitative evaluation scheme encompassing new criteria from social science perspectives (display of empathy, wit, understanding) and IPA-specific features (voice modulation, search redirects). We find EI displayed by Google Assistant in Hindi is comparable to EI displayed in English, with the assistant employing both voice modulation and emojis in text. However, we do find that IPAs are unable to understand and respond intelligently to all queries, sometimes even offering counter-productive and problematic responses. Our experiment offers evidence and directions to augment the potential for EI in IPAs.