Javier Caminero

A "Person" in the Interface: Effects on User Perceptions of Multibiometrics

In this paper we explore the possibilities that conversational agent technology offers for the improvement of the quality of human-machine interaction in a concrete area of application: the multimodal biometric authentication system. Our approach looks at the user perception effects related to the system interface rather than to the performance of the biometric technology itself. For this purpose we have created a multibiometric user test environment with two different interfaces or interaction metaphors: one with an embodied conversational agent and the other with on-screen text messages only. We present the results of an exploratory experiment that reveals interesting effects, related to the presence of a conversational agent, on the users perception of parameters such as privacy, ease of use, invasiveness or system security.