Making It Personal: End-User Authoring of Health Narratives Delivered by Virtual Agents

We describe a design study in which five different tools are compared for end-user authoring of personal stories to be told by an embodied conversational agent. The tools provide varying degrees of control over the agent's verbal and nonverbal behavior. Results indicate that users are more satisfied when their stories are delivered by a virtual agent compared to plain text, are more satisfied when provided with tools to control the agent's prosody compared to facial display of emotion, and are most satisfied when they have the most control over all aspects of the agent's delivery.

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