Comparing emotional vs. envelope feedback for ECAs

von der Pütten A, Reipen C, Wiedmann A, Kopp S, Krämer N. Comparing emotional vs. envelope feedback for ECAs. In: Proc. of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2008). LNAI. Vol 5208. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2008: 550-551.Opinions in the scientific community differ about what makes an Embodied Conversational Agent effective. Most research concentrates on the effectiveness of mere process oriented features of human-agent-communication like turn-taking or beat gestures. This study investigated whether emotional expressions influence the effectiveness of human-agent-interaction and the participants Ì emotional status after the experiment. 70 participants took part in a small talk (10 min.) situation with the virtual agent MAX. We implemented two different types of feedback: emotional feedback, which provided a feedback about the emotional state of MAX (including smiles and compliments) and envelope feedback, which provided a feedback about the comprehension of the participants Ì contributions and presents MAX as an attentive listener. We found that smiling was the only nonverbal behaviour which was significantly recognized and that the emotional feedback led to increased feelings of interest in the participants. There were no effects with regard to the evaluation of the effectiveness of the conversation