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International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

IVA 2016: Intelligent Virtual Agents pp 40–50Cite as

An Exploratory Study Toward the Preferred Conversational Style for Compatible Virtual Agents

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10011))

Abstract

Designing virtual personal assistants that are able to engage users in an interaction have been a challenge for HCI researchers for the past 20 years. In this work we investigated how a set of vocal characteristics known as “conversational style” could play role in engaging users in an interaction with a virtual agent. We also examined whether the similarity attraction principle influences how people orient towards agents with different styles. Results of a within subject experiment on 102 subjects revealed that users exhibited similarity attraction toward computer agents, and preferred the agent whose conversational style matched their own. The study results contribute to our understanding of how the design of intelligent agents’ conversational style influences users’ engagement and perceptions of the agent, compared to known human-to-human interaction.

A. Shamekhi, M. Novotny and G.A. Bennett---This research was done while the authors were working at Microsoft.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10121.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Ameneh Shamekhi

  2. Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond, Redmond, WA, USA

    Mary Czerwinski & Margeigh Novotny

  3. Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Gloria Mark

  4. Salesforce UX, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Gregory A. Bennett

Authors
  1. Ameneh Shamekhi
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  2. Mary Czerwinski
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  3. Gloria Mark
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  4. Margeigh Novotny
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  5. Gregory A. Bennett
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ameneh Shamekhi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    David Traum

  2. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    William Swartout

  3. US Army Research Laboratory, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Peter Khooshabeh

  4. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Stefan Kopp

  5. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Stefan Scherer

  6. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Anton Leuski

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

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Shamekhi, A., Czerwinski, M., Mark, G., Novotny, M., Bennett, G.A. (2016). An Exploratory Study Toward the Preferred Conversational Style for Compatible Virtual Agents. In: Traum, D., Swartout, W., Khooshabeh, P., Kopp, S., Scherer, S., Leuski, A. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10011. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47665-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47665-0_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47664-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47665-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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