You have full access to this open access article. Conversational technologies have become increasingly prevalent, with interactions becoming more and more personalized. This paper reviews literature on the phenomenon of self-disclosure to conversational technologies. Five types of factors emerge as influencing self-disclosure: interface modality, conversational factors, user characteristics, mediating mechanisms, and contextual factors.
We describe each type of factor, cover findings from the literature, present the framework of factors influencing self-disclosure that thus emerges, and put forth pertinent questions for future research on self-disclosure to conversational technologies.
Conversational technologies such as Siri, Google Home, Alexa, and several Internet of things IoT technologies pervade many aspects of our lives.
Rising demand, advances in natural language processing NLP , and reduced development costs have fueled the growth of conversational AI, such that the market size for conversational AI is expected to grow at an annual rate of Footnote 1 AI-powered messaging apps and speech-based apps are replacing traditional mobile and web applications and are expected to emerge as the new mode of communication.
Footnote 2 Aside from the more prevalent use cases of customer service and task-oriented dialog, conversational technologies are also being increasingly used to conduct interviews across various contexts such as personal [ 1 ], accounting [ 2 ], health [ 3 , 4 ], and counseling [ 5 ] and to deliver telehealth services to patients [ 6 ].
