Virtual Rapport

Effective face-to-face conversations are highly interactive. Participants respond to each other, engaging in nonconscious behavioral mimicry and backchanneling feedback. Such behaviors produce a subjective sense of rapport and are correlated with effective communication, greater liking and trust, an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gratch, Jonathan, Okhmatovskaia, Anna, Lamothe, Francois, Marsella, Stacy, Morales, Mathieu, Werf, R J van der, Morency, Louis-Philippe
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
BEHAVIOR MAPPING
CONVERSATIONS
Cybernetics
INTERACTIONS
Linguistics
MAN COMPUTER INTERFACE
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Psychology
SYMPOSIA
VERBAL BEHAVIOR
VIRTUAL HUMANS
WITHIN-UTTERANCE LISTENING BEHAVIORS
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Summary:Effective face-to-face conversations are highly interactive. Participants respond to each other, engaging in nonconscious behavioral mimicry and backchanneling feedback. Such behaviors produce a subjective sense of rapport and are correlated with effective communication, greater liking and trust, and greater influence between participants. Creating rapport requires a tight sense-act loop that has been traditionally lacking in embodied conversational agents. Here we describe a system, based on psycholinguistic theory, designed to create a sense of rapport between a human speaker and virtual human listener. We provide empirical evidence that it increases speaker fluency and engagement. Prepared in cooperation with the Ecole Speciale Militaire de St-Cyr, the University of Twente and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Presented at the International Conference of Virtual Agents (6th), IVA'06, held in Marina del Rey, CA on 21-23 Aug 2006. Published in proceedings of the same; ISBN 3540375937. The original document contains color images.