Helen McBreen

Experimental assessment of the effectiveness of synthetic personae for multi-modal e-retail applications

This paper details results of an experiment to empirically evaluate the effectiveness and user acceptability of human-like synthetic agents in a multi-modal electronic retail scenario. The synthetic personae played the roles of interactive conversational sales assistants. The range of life-like personae differed with respect to gender and technology. Participants took part in the controlled experiment, which involved them eavesdropping on spoken dialogues between a customer and each of the synthetic personae. They also completed questionnaires and took part in a debriefing interview designed to elicit information relating to the effectiveness, believability and perceived quality of each of the personae. Results show that participants expected a high level of realistic and human-like verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviour in the synthetic personae. This was demonstrated in the strong preference for personae that exhibited natural facial expressions, gestures and emotions. It was also found that disembodied voices were significantly preferred to many of the personae. In addition, results show participants had significantly different attitudes to the voices of the personae.

Embodied Conversational Agents in E-Commerce Applications

This section discusses an empirical evaluation of 3D embodied conversational agents, in three interactive VRML e-commerce environments: a cinema box-office, a travel agency and a bank. Results showed participants enjoyed speaking to the agents and expressed a desire for agents in the cinema to be informally dressed but those in the bank to be formally dressed. Qualitative results suggested that participants found it difficult to assign a degree of trust to the agents in the banking application.

Experimental evaluation of the use of ECAs in ecommerce applications

This chapter describes an experimental approach to the evaluation of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) within eCommerce contexts and exemplifies the approach with three case studies. Results are presented from three experiments into the usability of eCommerce applications employing 3D ECAs within the domain of eRetail and eBanking. The findings described here confirm user preferences for applications in which the agent acts as a conversational partner compared with a non-visual telephone applica- tion using speech recognition. Further, data in this chapter confirm the positive role of ECAs in interfaces and the benefits to that role of adding other modalities such as text output.