Improving active listening behaviours of embodied conversational agents (ECA) from a UX perspective

Sammanfattning: Active listening is a communication technique where the listener listens to the speaker carefully and attentively by confirming or asking for more details about what they heard during a conversation. Active listening has proven to be a very useful technique in learning and extracting insightful information from the conversation and poses many challenges when emulating such behaviours in a virtual character. In this research, various active listening behaviours are explored according to context, so that these behaviours can be adopted by Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA’s) to be perceived as more believable humanistic characters. This publication describes those behaviours in-depth by gathering insights via expert Interviews. An experiment was carried out with 20 participants (12 men and 8 women) to identify the implemented behaviours and their overall effect during a generic conversation with the ECA. The results showed that the participants were able to identify most of the implemented active-listening behaviours like Interested/inquisitive, agreement/approval (head nod and corresponding sounds), and provided insights for further improvement of the interlocution.