Understanding the adoption of chatbot: A case study of Siri

Abstract

Due to a recent development in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, chatbots can understand the human language much better than before. E-commerce businesses are beginning to adopt chatbots in their operations, in areas, such as customer service, product inquiry and transaction refund, etc. However, there is still a lack of studies on users’ adoption of chatbots, and businesses are uncertain how to develop chatbots that will increase users’ adoption. The purpose of this study is to use sentiment analysis to understand the adoption of chatbots. This study used Siri-related comments posted on the social networking site Weibo during the period January 2017 to July 2017 to conduct the sentiment analysis. The results reveal that users generally had positive emotions with Siri and they used Siri mainly because they wanted to ‘come on to’ or ‘take liberties with’ the chatbot. In this study, we also compared Siri and Alime, which is a chatbot developed by Alibaba. This study then explored how the results of the sentiment analysis can be applied to the development of chatbots.