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4. Conclusions & Future Research

Establishing trust between the agent and the user is of great importance,
and on-going research [4] is exploring the construction of a social relationship
to assist with establishing trust. Unless users are confident that the agent can
understand and process information correctly they may be less likely to trust it,
resulting in a less effective interaction. In the study by van Mulken et al [12]
results showed personification of interfaces does not appear to be sufficient for
raising trustworthiness. If this is the case what other methods could be used
for establishing trust in e-commerce applications?
The use of text in the interface could be used to provide feedback to the
user about the information the agents have received and processed and may
improve user confidence. Allowing the use of keyboard entry in conjunction
with speech input, especially when entering security details may also be an
improvement. Using the same experimental platform described for this exper-
iment, text-input and text-output will be added to the system in order to further
the research aspects of user confidence to ECA’s in e-commerce applications.
Research suggests the development of ECA’s in all domains will be dictated
not only by technological advances but also by advances in the understanding
and creation of the social interaction between the agent and user, in particular
the establishment of trust.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to colleagues at CCIR for helpful comments, in particular Prof. M.A. Jack and Dr.
J.C. Foster. Sincere gratitude is also expressed to Dr. J.A. Anderson for developing the dialogue
manager software.

References

[1] E. Andre and T. Rist. Personalising the user interface: Projects on life-like characters at
DFKI. In Proc. 3rd Workshop on Conversational Characters, 167–170, October 1998.
[2] N. Badler, R. Bindiganavale, J. Allbeck, W. Schuler, L. Zhao, and M. Palmer. Parameter-
ized action representation for virtual human agents. In J. Cassell, et al. (eds.), Embodied
Conversational Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.
[3] G. Ball and J. Breese. Emotion and personality in a conversational agent. In J. Cassell,
et al. (eds.), Embodied Conversational Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.
[4] T. Bickmore and J. Cassell. How about this weather? Social dialogue with embodied
conversational agents. In Proc. AAAI Fall Symposium: Socially Intelligent Agents, 4–8,
November 2000.
[5] M. Bricken. Virtual worlds: No interface to design. Technical Report R-90-2. Washington
Technology Center, WA, 1990.
[6] J. Cassell, et al. (eds.). Embodied Conversational Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
2000.