  Introducing curiosities in a conversation is a way to teach something new to
the person in a pleasant and enjoyable way. Enriching dialogues with
contextualized curiosities can improve the users' perception of a dialog system
and their overall user experience. In this paper, we introduce a set of curated
curiosities, targeting dialogues in the cooking and DIY domains. In particular,
we use real human-agent conversations collected in the context of the Amazon
Alexa TaskBot challenge, a multimodal and multi-turn conversational setting.
According to an A/B test with over 1000 conversations, curiosities not only
increase user engagement, but provide an average relative rating improvement of
9.7%.
