Can a Machine Tend to Teenagers' Emotional Needs?

As teen stress and its negative consequences are on the rise, several studies have attempted to tend to their emotional needs through conversational agents (CAs). However, these attempts have focused on increasing human-like traits of agents, thereby overlooking the possible advantage of machine inherits, such as lack of emotion or the ability to perform calculations. Therefore, this paper aims to shed light on the machine inherits of CAs to help satisfy the emotional needs of teenagers. We conducted a workshop with 20 teenagers, followed by in-depth interviews with six of the participants. We discovered that teenagers expected CAs to (1) be good listeners due to their lack of emotion, (2) keep their secrets by being separated from the human world, and (3) give them advice based on the analysis of sufficient data. Based on our findings, we offer three design guidelines to build CAs.