How to Design the Expression Ways of Conversational Agents Based on Affective Experience

Abstract

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the technology of human-computer interaction is becoming more and more mature. The variety of terminal products equipped with conversational agents are more diverse, and the product penetration rate is also getting higher and higher. This study focused on the problems of the conversational agent in response. In this paper, we presented a study with 20 participants to explore how to design the expression ways of conversational agents’ feedback with considerations of users’ affective experience. We explored the performance of three different expression ways (general way, implicit way, and explicit way) in different time and different functions. And we examined whether users of different genders have different preferences for these three expression ways. Therefore, we used the “Wizard of Oz techniques” to simulate a real environment for communication between the user and the conversational agent. In this study, we combined quantitative scoring (five aspects: affection, confidence, naturalness, social distance, and satisfaction) with qualitative interviews. The results showed that: (1) the user’s affective experience should be considered in expression ways’ design; (2) different expression ways had different performances in different functions, and the explicit way performed better in most situations; (3) male users seemed to rate the agent’s expression performance higher than female users.