Toward an Objective Linguistic-Based Measure of Perceived Embodied Conversational Agent Power and Likeability

Embodied conversational agents (ECA) are a type of intelligent, multimodal computer interface that allow computers to interact with humans in a face-to-face manner. It is quite feasible that ECAs will someday replace the common keyboard as a human–computer interface. However, we have much to understand about how people interact with such embodied virtual agents. In this study, we performed a laboratory experiment, in an airport screening context, to assess how people’s linguistic behavior changes with their perceptions of the ECA’s power and likeability. The results show that people tend to manifest more verbal immediacy and expressivity, as well as offer more information about themselves, with ECAs they perceive as more likeable and less powerful.

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