Paper Info
Title
Designing empathic virtual agents: manipulating animation, voice, rendering, and empathy to create persuasive agents
Abstract
Designers of virtual agents have a combinatorically large space of choices for the look and behavior of their characters. We conducted two between-subjects studies to explore the systematic manipulation of animation quality, speech quality, rendering style, and simulated empathy, and its impact on perceptions of virtual agents in terms of naturalness, engagement, trust, credibility, and persuasion within a health counseling domain. In the first study, animation was varied between manually created, procedural, or no animations; voice quality was varied between recorded audio and synthetic speech; and rendering style was varied between realistic and toon-shaded. In the second study, simulated empathy of the agent was varied between no empathy, verbal-only empathic responses, and full empathy involving verbal, facial, and immediacy feedback. Results show that natural animations and recorded voice are more appropriate for the agent's general acceptance, trust, credibility, and appropriateness for the task. However, for a brief health counseling task, animation might actually be distracting from the persuasive message, with the highest levels of persuasion found when the amount of agent animation is minimized. Further, consistent and high levels of empathy improve agent perception but may interfere with forming a trusting bond with the agent.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s10458-021-09539-1
AUTONOMOUS AGENTS AND MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Virtual agents, Animation fidelity, Voice quality, Rendering style, Simulated empathy, Agent perception
Journal
36
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1387-2532
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
5
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jeremy N. Bailenson111913.36
Stefan Olafsson213.40
Dina Utami342.83
Prasanth Murali464.47
Timothy Bickmore52581318.35