Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents
This paper extends our previous work which demonstrated that social dialogue can have a significant impact on a user's trust of an ECA, by investigating whether these results hold in the absence of nonverbal cues. We present the results of a study designed to determine whether the psychological
effects of social dialogue – namely to increase trust and associated positive evaluations - vary when the nonverbal cues provided by the embodied conversational agent are removed. In addition to varying medium (voice only vs. embodied) and dialogue style (social dialogue vs. task-only) we also assessed and examined effects due to the user's personality along the introversion/extroversion dimension, since extroversion is one indicator of a person's comfort level with faceto-face interaction.