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Party Hosts and Tour Guides 49

2.2 Evaluation of the Success of Helper Agent

We conducted an experiment to test the effectiveness of Helper Agent, in
assisting in conversations between Japanese and American students. (For more
about the method and results, please see Isbister, Nakanishi, Ishida, and Nass).
People did engage with the agent. Most quickly grasped its purpose - accepting
theagent asavalidparticipant, takingturnswithit, andtakingupitssuggestions.

3. Tour Guide Agent

3.1 Designing Tour Guide Agent
The Tour Guide Agent project was part of Digital City Kyoto
(http://www.digitalcity.gr.jp/). The tour was to be a point of entry to the online
resource and to Kyoto, ideally increasing visitor interest in and use of the digital
city. The tour was also designed to encourage dialogue and relationships among
participants, and to increase exposure to Kyoto’s history among friends and
family of participants.
To create the agent’s behavior, we observed tour guides, and read profes-
sional manuals on tour guide strategy (Pond). Strategies for storytelling that
we imitated:
1. Stories were told about particular locations while in front of them.
2. Some stories included tales about previous tours.
3. Stories were selected partly because they were easy and fun to retell.
4. Guides adjusted timing and follow-up based on audience response.
In our system, the digital tour-takers are all chatting in an online text environ-
ment, and use a simple 3-D control set to explore a virtual model of parts of
Nijo Castle in Kyoto (see Figure 2). At each stop, the tour guide tells related
stories, using gesture and expression to highlight key points.
The agent tracks the quantity of conversation, and looks for positive and
negative keywords that indicate how visitors feel at the moment (negative words
such as "boring, dull, too long"; positive words such as "wow, cool, neat,
interesting"). The agent selects stories using a very simple decision rule (see
Figure 3).
To make sure the tour stops for the right duration, the agent moves to the
next stop only when a majority of tour-takers say they want to move forward.
(For more about this project’s technical details, please see Isbister).

3.2 Lessons Learned
Though we did not perform a formal evaluation, preliminary review of reac-
tions to the tour indicated that the agent’s stories were serving as a successful
springboard for conversation, and worked nicely to supplement the visitors’
experience of the virtual castle.