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Effectiveness and usability of an online help agent embodied as a talking head

Published: 20 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

An empirical study is presented which aims at assessing the possible effects of embodiment on online help effectiveness and attraction. 22 undergraduate students who were unfamiliar with animation creation software created two simple animations with Flash, using two multimodal online help agents, EH and UH, one per animation. Both help agents used the same database of speech and graphics messages; EH was personified using a talking head while UH was not embodied. EH and UH presentation order was counterbalanced between participants.
Subjective judgments elicited through verbal and nonverbal questionnaires indicate that the presence of the ECA was well accepted by participants and its influence on help effectiveness perceived as positive. Analysis of eye tracking data indicates that the ECA actually attracted their visual attention and interest, since they glanced at it from the beginning to the end of the animation creation (75 fixations during 40 min.). Contrastingly, post-tests marks and interaction traces suggest that the ECA's presence had no perceivable effect on concept or skill learning and task execution. It only encouraged help consultation.

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  • (2011)A Survey and Empirical Study of Virtual Reference Service in Academic LibrariesThe Journal of Academic Librarianship10.1016/j.acalib.2011.02.00337:2(120-129)Online publication date: Mar-2011

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICMI '08: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
October 2008
322 pages
ISBN:9781605581989
DOI:10.1145/1452392
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 20 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. embodied conversational agents
  2. empirical study
  3. ergonomic evaluation
  4. eye tracking
  5. online help
  6. talking heads

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ICMI '08
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ICMI '08: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERFACES
October 20 - 22, 2008
Crete, Chania, Greece

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  • (2011)A Survey and Empirical Study of Virtual Reference Service in Academic LibrariesThe Journal of Academic Librarianship10.1016/j.acalib.2011.02.00337:2(120-129)Online publication date: Mar-2011

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