An intimate virtual counselor for a better user experience

Abstract

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are suffering from a lack of adoption from users. This paper emphasizes virtual intimacy as a lever to support social dimension of human-agent interaction and enhance user experience. Here, we present an autonomous virtual counselor, expert in tourism, which provides multimodal intimacy-related behaviors. Real tourists interacting in the wild with our intimate agent only perceived its honesty and genuineness, which was insufficient to enhance social presence and user experience. However, our results suggest that the perception of virtual intimacy could be a strong predictor of social presence and user experience. When perceived, virtual intimacy may be, then, an important mean to foster user experience and ECAs adoption.