From Assistants to Friends: Investigating Emotional Intelligence of IPAs in Hindi and English

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.