Relational agents: a model and implementation of building user trust

Building trust with users is crucial in a wide range of applications, such as advice-giving or financial transactions, and some minimal degree of trust is required in all applications to even initiate and maintain an interaction with a user. Humans use a variety of relational conversational strategies, including small talk, to establish trusting relationships with each other. We argue that such strategies can also be used by interface agents, and that embodied conversational agents are ideally suited for this task given the myriad sociocultural cues available to them for signaling trustworthiness. We describe a formal theory of social dialogue, a real implementation in an embodied conversation agent, and an experiment in which the use of social dialogue was demonstrated to have an effect on trust for users with a disposition to be extroverts. Keywords Embodied conversational agent, trust, social interface, natural language, small talk, personality.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Timothy W. Bickmore, Justine Cassell
• Keywords: CHI 2001, Embodied Conversation Agent, Human Computer Interaction, Myriad Sociocultural Cues, Relational Conversational Strategies