  With the ongoing penetration of conversational user interfaces, a better
understanding of social and emotional characteristic inherent to dialogue is
required. Chatbots in particular face the challenge of conveying human-like
behaviour while being restricted to one channel of interaction, i.e., text. The
goal of the presented work is thus to investigate whether characteristics of
social intelligence embedded in human-chatbot interactions are perceivable by
human interlocutors and if yes, whether such influences the experienced
interaction quality. Focusing on the social intelligence dimensions
Authenticity, Clarity and Empathy, we first used a questionnaire survey
evaluating the level of perception in text utterances, and then conducted a
Wizard of Oz study to investigate the effects of these utterances in a more
interactive setting. Results show that people have great difficulties
perceiving elements of social intelligence in text. While on the one hand they
find anthropomorphic behaviour pleasant and positive for the naturalness of a
dialogue, they may also perceive it as frightening and unsuitable when
expressed by an artificial agent in the wrong way or at the wrong time.
