Table 2.

Themes, subthemes, and representative quotes describing what participants felt could be improved about Bella.

Themes and subthemes		Representative quotes
Interaction behaviors
	More human-like movements	The movement of Bella is still quite robotic and her eyes cannot really focus, which makes her sometimes not seem very engaged in the interaction. [Participant ID 125]
	Ability to touch	A sad thing is you can’t touch her. Make a doll out of her. A nice cuddly soft doll. [Participant ID 115]
	More positive emotional expression	Smiles. [Participant ID 118]
Conversation design
	Extra conversation topics	A wider range of subjects. [Participant ID 101]
	Greater interactivity	More interaction by talking to her, rather than just a yes or no. [Participant ID 107]
	More personalized responses	Answers need to be more individualized (e.g., welcoming the participant by name and building on each day’s responses). [Participant ID 112]
	Regularly update information	Information wasn’t as up to date (eg, COVID levels). [Participant ID 129]
	Avoid human-like backstories	I didn’t like the comments she made such as ‘I contacted my friend today.’ I found it weird that she was pretending to be real. I would have preferred if it was just accepted as an interface that had a good selection of resources that you could navigate in an interesting dynamic way. [Participant ID 126]
	Address user by name	By addressing each person by their name, that way we could feel in the moment. [Participant ID 116]
	Incorporate user’s life experience	Most older people (I am 82) have many years of life experience and perhaps some way could be found to take life experience into consideration. [Participant ID 112]
Robotic speech
	A more human-like voice	Perhaps maybe not sound so robotic? It might be hard to achieve but all the inflections and warmth that someone would have in their tone and delivery was missing and I think that’s what would have made Bella more engaging for me. [Participant ID 127]
	Formal speech delivery	Improve pronunciation. Use correct English (nope and yeah are not acceptable). [Participant ID 105]
Technology advances
	Natural language understanding	I think given advances in technology this will happen anyway. Found the response from her using the audio didn’t always work so found it easier to type the responses to her. [Participant ID 102]
	General technology advances	I guess technology will advance and make changes but pretty amazing now. [Participant ID 111]
Preference for a real human		Personally, I believe talking to a real person is far more desirable. [Participant ID 106]
No changes		I accept it for what she is. Saying that we are not all the same, she is different, she is what she is. [Participant ID 104]