Papers about Human's perception of Agent

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of verbal abuse in spontaneous human-chatterbot conversations. An ethnographic study suggested that abuse is pervasive and may reflect an asymmetrical power distribution, where the user is the master, and the chatterbot the slave. We propose that verbal aggression in this setting may be a social norm applied by users to differentiate themselves from the machine in what can be regarded as a form of interspecies conflict. The findings stress... Read more

We studied the role of the competence of an interface agent that helped users to learn and use a text editor. Participants in the study made a set of changes to a document with the aid of one of four interface agents. The agent would respond to participants’ spoken questions as well as make proactive suggestions using a synthesized voice. The agents varied in the quality of responses and... Read more

Individuality of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) may depend on both the look of the agent and the way it combines different modalities such as speech and gesture. In this chapter, we describe a study in which male and female users had to listen to three short technical presentations made by ECAs. Three multimodal strategies of ECAs for using arm gestures with speech were compared: redundancy, complementarity, and speech-specialization. These strategies were randomly attributed to different-looking... Read more

The main reason for bringing life-like characters onto the internet is commercial. They may attract users to a particular page and encourage them to log on more often and/or stay longer than otherwise in the application. This is of course advantageous for providers selling advertising. In the following we describe Flirtboat, a commercial multi-user application for the internet where users design their representatives and send them off to a virtual community (a net environment), and we... Read more

Avatars play an important role in international online communities. While certain simple expressions, such as facial emotional expressions are cultural independent, more complex expressions might not be. Therefore we conducted a cross-cultural study to investigate the influence of the users’ cultural background (Japanese or Dutch) on their perception of avatar’s expressions in terms of perceived arousal and valence. A significant gender difference was found for valence. Women and in particular Japanese women rated the expressions more... Read more

The social interaction between librarian and patron that occurs in the traditional library setting is a unique and important component of the services that libraries provide. With more services moving online, libraries face the challenge of providing a friendly, socially rich environment for their online users. Using interface agent technology could be one way to make online library services more socially engaging. Read more

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally... Read more

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally... Read more

Among the goals of research on autonomous agents one important aim is to build Believable Interactive Embodied Agents that are apt to be applied to friendly interfaces in e-commerce, tourist and service query systems, entertainment (e.g. synthetic actors) and education (pedagogical agents, agents for help and instruction to the hearing impaired). A believable agent is one able to show (even, may be, to feel?) emotions and one who has a definite personality. An interactive agent... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are synthetic characters which can converse with the user (or with other ECAs) by some natural modalities of human-human communication. ECAs have become increasingly popular, as the promising new interface for several traditional computer applications or as the basis for applications in entirely new domains. Much research has been going on to endow ECAs with own behavioral, personality and emotional models, to enable ECAs to act more or less... Read more