Design and evaluation of Elva: an embodied tour guide in an interactive virtual art gallery

Abstract

The technology of embodied conversational agents provides an attractive approach to achieving natural human-computer interaction if the interaction design is handled sensitively. In view of this, we designed and developed an embodied tour guide, Elva, 'who' is able to engage conversationally with users about gallery exhibits and also capable of behaving non-verbally using gesture and facial expression. The research focuses on the attributes of agent autonomy and believability. To achieve autonomy, we present a threelayer architectural design to ensure appropriate coupling between the agent's perception and action. With regard to believability, we utilize the notion of schema to support structured and coherent verbal behaviours. We also pay careful attention to the design of non-verbal interactions that establish social facts within the virtual world. A user study was performed to evaluate user satisfaction and agent believability.

A New Distributed Platform for Client-Side Fusion of Web Applications and Natural Modalities—a Multimodal Web Platform

“…Embodied conversational agents are also increasingly used in various web-related contexts, for example, teaching, socialization, chats, and branding websites (Diesbach and Midgley 2008). Such agents have already been used in web applications such as question-answering systems (Bickmore, Pfeifer, and Paasche-Orlow 2007;Theune et al 2007;Goh et al 2006), learning communicative agents (Xu et al 2010;Yuan and Chee 2005), or as communicative agents in 554 I. Mlakar and M. Rojc different online networks (Repenning and Sullivan 2003;Jan et al 2009;Paraiso and Tacla 2009).…”

Systems Engineering and Conversational Agents

“…• Usability [40,56,[65][66][67][68][69] • User satisfaction [56,65,68,[70][71][72] • Agent credibility [70,73,74] The first two are common but difficult to measure attributes from the field of software engineering [59]. There are many more intangible and vague attributes mentioned in studies, including: "Fun to talk with" [38], "lovely, pleasant, black humorous" [70], "Intimacy, Benevolence" [37], "Comfort, Solidarity, Familiarity" [75] and "Trust, Uncertainty, Attractive" [66].…”

“…There are many more intangible and vague attributes mentioned in studies, including: "Fun to talk with" [38], "lovely, pleasant, black humorous" [70], "Intimacy, Benevolence" [37], "Comfort, Solidarity, Familiarity" [75] and "Trust, Uncertainty, Attractive" [66].…”

“…friendliness, enjoyment) [65,66] [63, 75, 76] • Various negative emotional attributes (e.g. boredom, fluster) [63,65,76] • Whether the user would use again [58,65,76,77] or prefer human service [56,61,76] There are also a substantial number of attributes which occur once or twice including "like further help" [65], "narrative skills" [70], "needs improvement" [76], "question answering capability" [70] and "how much willing to pay" [37].…”

VOX system: a semantic embodied conversational agent exploiting linked data

“…Now, we want to make ECAs able to offer a broad and deep knowledge of large domains, while interacting with its human users. Virtual characters equipped with these new features can be used in a wide range of contexts [12,32], including education and learning [19,20,27,37], sign language interpretation [39], therapy [30], persuasion [6], and entertainment [48], among others.…”