Working Together with Conversational Agents: the Relationship of Perceived Cooperation with Service Performance Evaluations

Conversational agents are gradually being deployed by organizations in service settings to communicate with and solve problems together with consumers. The current study investigates how consumers’ perceptions of cooperation with conversational agents in a service context are associated with their perceptions about agents’ anthropomorphism, social presence, the quality of the information provided by an agent, and the agent service performance. An online experiment was conducted in which participants performed a service-oriented task with the assistance of conversational agents developed specifically for the study and evaluated the performance and attributes of the agents. The results suggest a direct positive link between perceiving a conversational agent as cooperative and perceiving it to be more anthropomorphic, with higher levels of social presence and providing better information quality. Moreover, the results also show that the link between perceiving an agent as cooperative and the agent’s service performance is mediated by perceptions of the agent’s anthropomorphic cues and the quality of the information provided by the agent

Virtual Environments

submitted for publication consideration to the journal of Presence: Teleoperators an

Reflections on Real Presence by a Virtual Person

the MIT Press

Technology Enhanced Learning

Research issues and challenges related to technology-enhanced learning are discussed for classroom learning at a distance, online learning, digital libraries, special collections and online resources, virtual laboratories, e-collaboration, and virtual environments. Recognizing the potential of small changes in technology to have large effects on learning and learning systems, treating the development process as a living laboratory, documenting and collecting technology enhanced learning anecdotes (both positive and negative), gathering hard data across projects, and designing with dissemination to real teachers and learners in mind are highlighted. 1