Page 285 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

268 Socially Intelligent Agents

skills as in the real world, enhancing mundane transactions and encouraging a
sense of presence for the user, resulting in more effective and efficient inter-
action. Developing further this proposal, Ball [3] demonstrated that endowing
animated agents with personality and emotion creates a sense of social pres-
ence, leading to more useful conversational interfaces. The existence of this
social presence is important in order to begin to understand the development
of the interaction between the agent and the user. It follows from this that
understanding the creation and development of social relationships between
the agents and the users is a crucial first step to creating socially intelligent
embodied conversational agents.
There is little empirical evidence yet available to demonstrate the effective-
ness of ECA’s, particularly in e-commerce applications and there is a growing
need for the establishment of objective and subjective measures of usability.
Ostermann [10] developed an architecture designed to support e-commerce
“by providing a more friendly, helpful and intuitive user interface compared to
a regular browser”. Results from experiments using this architecture showed
that facial animation was favoured over text only interfaces. These results are
encouraging, but it is also necessary to investigate the range of applications that
can be significantly enhanced by the presence of an ECA and what are users’
attitudes toward their appearance, personality and trustworthiness during the
interaction.
The goal of this study is to present empirical evidence in support of the use
of the agents within e-commerce domains, in addition to documenting qualita-
tive and quantitative data regarding users’ subjective experience of successive
interactions with the agents. A detailed discussion of the experimental find-
ings is obviously beyond the scope of this section, however the experimental
procedure, key findings and challenge problems are presented.

2. Experimental Research

This experiment assessed two types of 3D male and female embodied agents,
appearing as assistants in VRML e-commerce applications (cinema, travel
agency and bank). The agents types were a smartly dressed (formal) agent and
a casually dressed (informal) agent. In order to evaluate the agents, a real-time
experimental platform system, capable of face-to-face conversation between
the user and the agent was used.
The first prediction was that participants would believe ECA’s have a role to
play as assistants. This prediction was made based on the results of previous
experiments, where customers passively viewed conversational agents in retail
spaces [9] and indicated a desire to actually converse with them. A second pre-
diction was that participants would enjoy speaking to the agents equally in all
three applications. This prediction was made based on the fact that the agents