Page 64 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Party Hosts and Tour Guides 47

conversation (Cassell), to indicate who they are referring to, or who might know
more about a topic, and to help delineate conversational sub-groups within the
main group (Clark, Hall).
To design a successful agent for this context, I believe there are several design
factors to keep in mind:
It’s important that the agent ’knows’ when to take the floor, and what
value it might have when it does, as well as when to give up the floor.
The agent should use proper turn-taking cues, and demonstrate sensitiv-
ity to facilitating the overall social flow of the conversation, rather than
focussing on modelling or adapting to any one person.
The agent should have a clear and appropriate social role, such as host or
guide (see Isbister and Hayes-Roth for a demonstration of the effective-
ness of an agent’s social role in influencing visitor behavior).

In the sections that follow, I describe two interface agent projects which in-
corporated group-focused nonverbal social cue tracking and expression. Please
see the acknowledgements section of this paper for a list of contributors to this
research.

2. Helper Agent
2.1 Design of Helper Agent

Helper Agent supports human-human conversations in a video chat environ-
ment. Users have avatars they can move freely around the space, and Helper
Agent is an animated, dog-faced avatar, which spends most of its time listening,
at a distance. The agent tracks audio from two-person conversations, looking
for longer silences. When it detects one, it approaches, directs a series of
text-based, yes/no questions to both people, and uses their answers to guide its
suggestion for a new topic to talk about. Then the agent retreats until needed
again (see Figure 1).
Because Helper Agent is presented on-screen the same way users are, we
could use nonverbal cues, such as turning to face users as it poses a question
to them, and approaching and departing the conversation physically. The ani-
mations include nonverbal cues for asking questions, reacting to affirmative or
negative responses, and making suggestions. The dog orients its face toward the
user that it is addressing, with the proper expression for each phase: approach,
first question, reaction, follow-up question, and finally topic suggestion. Af-
ter concluding a suggestion cycle, the agent leaves the conversation zone, and
meanders at a distance, until it detects another awkward silence. This makes
it clear to the conversation pair that the agent need not be included in their
discussion.