  Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Home, and
Microsoft's Cortana, are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives and
successfully help users in various daily tasks, such as making phone calls or
playing music. Yet, they still struggle with playful utterances, which are not
meant to be interpreted literally. Examples include jokes or absurd requests or
questions such as, "Are you afraid of the dark?", "Who let the dogs out?", or
"Order a zillion gummy bears". Today, virtual assistants often return
irrelevant answers to such utterances, except for hard-coded ones addressed by
canned replies.
  To address the challenge of automatically detecting playful utterances, we
first characterize the different types of playful human-virtual assistant
interaction. We introduce a taxonomy of playful requests rooted in theories of
humor and refined by analyzing real-world traffic from Alexa. We then focus on
one node, personification, where users refer to the virtual assistant as a
person ("What do you do for fun?"). Our conjecture is that understanding such
utterances will improve user experience with virtual assistants. We conducted a
Wizard-of-Oz user study and showed that endowing virtual assistant s with the
ability to identify humorous opportunities indeed has the potential to increase
user satisfaction. We hope this work will contribute to the understanding of
the landscape of the problem and inspire novel ideas and techniques towards the
vision of giving virtual assistants a sense of humor.
