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“What Would You Like to Talk About?” An Evaluation of Social Conversations with a Virtual Receptionist

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Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4133))

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Abstract

We describe an empirical study of Marve, a virtual receptionist located at the entrance of our research laboratory. Marve engages with lab members and visitors in natural face-to-face communication, takes and delivers messages, tells knock-knock jokes, conducts natural small talk on movies, and discusses the weather. In this research, we investigate the relative popularity of Marve’s social conversational capabilities and his role-specific messaging tasks, as well as his perceived social characteristics. Results indicate that users are interested in interacting with Marve, use social conversational conventions with Marve, and perceive and describe him as a social entity.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Babu, S., Schmugge, S., Barnes, T., Hodges, L.F. (2006). “What Would You Like to Talk About?” An Evaluation of Social Conversations with a Virtual Receptionist. In: Gratch, J., Young, M., Aylett, R., Ballin, D., Olivier, P. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4133. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11821830_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11821830_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37593-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37594-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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