Abstract
In this paper, we describe an experiment we conducted to determine the user’s level of engagement in a multi-party scenario consisting of human and synthetic interlocutors. In particular, we were interested in the question of whether humans accept a synthetic agent as a genuine conversational partner that is worthy of being attended to in the same way as the human interlocutors. We concentrated on gaze behaviors as one of the most important predictors of conversational attention. Surprisingly, humans paid more attention to an agent that talked to them than to a human conversational partner. No such effect was observed in the reciprocal case, namely when humans addressed an agent as opposed to a human interlocutor.
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Rehm, M., André, E. (2005). Where Do They Look? Gaze Behaviors of Multiple Users Interacting with an Embodied Conversational Agent. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3661. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28738-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-28739-1
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