The Effects of Embodiment and Social Eye-Gaze in Conversational Agents

摘要

The adoption of conversational agents is growing at a rapidpace. Agents however, are not optimised to simulate key so-cial aspects of situated human conversational environments.Humans are intellectually biased towards social activity whenfacing more anthropomorphic agents or when presented withsubtle social cues. In this work, we explore the effects of simu-lating anthropomorphism and social eye-gaze in three conver-sational agents. We tested whether subjects’ visual attentionwould be similar to agents in different forms of embodimentand social eye-gaze. In a within-subject situated interactionstudy (N=30), we asked subjects to engage in task-orienteddialogue with a smart speaker and two variations of a socialrobot. We observed shifting of interactive behaviour by hu-man users, as shown in differences in behavioural and objec-tive measures. With a trade-off in task performance, socialfacilitation is higher with more anthropomorphic social agentswhen performing the same task.