Google Research, Carnegie
Abstract
The growing ubiquity of conversational AI highlights the need for frameworks
that capture not only users' instrumental goals but also the situated,
adaptive, and social practices through which they achieve them. Existing
taxonomies of conversational behavior either overgeneralize, remain
domain-specific, or reduce interactions to narrow dialogue functions. To
address this gap, we introduce the Taxonomy of User Needs and Actions (TUNA),
an empirically grounded framework developed through iterative qualitative
analysis of 1193 human-AI conversations, supplemented by theoretical review and
validation across diverse contexts. TUNA organizes user actions into a
three-level hierarchy encompassing behaviors associated with information
seeking, synthesis, procedural guidance, content creation, social interaction,
and meta-conversation. By centering user agency and appropriation practices,
TUNA enables multi-scale evaluation, supports policy harmonization across
products, and provides a backbone for layering domain-specific taxonomies. This
work contributes a systematic vocabulary for describing AI use, advancing both
scholarly understanding and practical design of safer, more responsive, and
more accountable conversational systems.
AI Insights - English accounts for 56âŻ% of dialogues, with Chinese and Russian at 15.2âŻ% and 11.4âŻ%.
- Coding, factoid, and homework use cases cover over 70âŻ% of interactions.
- Dialogue languages span 18 scripts, from English to Arabic, Vietnamese, and Hungarian.
- MIDASâs fineâgrained dialogâact scheme complements TUNAâs action hierarchy for crossâframework analysis.
- Jailbreakâprompt research shows LLMs can bypass safety, underscoring TUNAâs metaâconversation layer.
- 'Control Through Communication' offers a historical view on managerial systems, echoing TUNAâs userâagency focus.
- The Journal of Documentation and Information Processing & Management feature foundational taxonomy and dialog studies.