Modular Conversational Agents for Surveys and Interviews

Surveys and interviews are widely used for collecting insights on emerging or hypothetical scenarios. Traditional human-led methods often face challenges related to cost, scalability, and consistency. Recently, various domains have begun to explore the use of conversational agents (chatbots) powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. However, considering decisions in transportation investments and policies often carry significant public and environmental stakes, surveys and interviews face unique challenges in integrating AI agents, underscoring the need for a rigorous, resource-efficient approach that enhances participant engagement and ensures privacy. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a modular approach and its resulting parameterized process for designing AI agents. We detail the system architecture, integrating engineered prompts, specialized knowledge bases, and customizable, goal-oriented conversational logic. We demonstrate the adaptability, generalizability, and efficacy of our modular approach through three empirical studies: (1) travel preference surveys, highlighting conditional logic and multimodal (voice, text, and image generation) capabilities; (2) public opinion elicitation on a newly constructed, novel infrastructure project, showcasing question customization and multilingual (English and French) capabilities; and (3) expert consultation about the impact of technologies on future transportation systems, highlighting real-time, clarification request capabilities for open-ended questions, resilience in handling erratic inputs, and efficient transcript postprocessing. The results suggest that the AI agent increases completion rates and response quality. Furthermore, the modular approach demonstrates controllability, flexibility, and robustness while addressing key ethical, privacy, security, and token consumption concerns.