Virtual Rapport

Abstract

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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA459210

Entities

People

  • Anna Okhmatovskaia
  • Francois Lamothe
  • Jonathan Gratch
  • Louis-Philippe Morency
  • Mathieu Morales
  • R. J. Van Der Werf
  • Stacy C. Marsella

Organizations

  • University of Southern California

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cameras
  • Computer Programs
  • Detection
  • Frequency
  • Human Behavior
  • Intensity
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Personality
  • Psychology
  • Questionnaires
  • Signal Processing
  • Social Psychology
  • Speech Quality
  • Statistics
  • Virtual Reality

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.
  • Systems Analysis and Design