Virtual Intimacy, this little something between us: A study about Human perception of intimate behaviors in Embodied Conversational Agents

Building a long-term relationship between human and virtual agent remains a challenge. This paper explores the influence of intimate behavioral cues and the impact of different interaction modalities (voice, text, gesture) on our perception of intimacy. We built a virtual Tourism Information (TI) counselor capable of intimate behaviors based on grounded theories of intimacy developed in psychology. We studied how external observers perceive the social behaviors of the agent during its interactions with a human tourist. Our originality is to evaluate the perception of social skills across the interaction. Our results show that nonverbal behaviors of the virtual agent reinforces the impact of verbal cues on human perception on virtual intimacy. Findings also suggest that textual medium of communication has a negative impact on the perception of virtual intimacy, whatever the level of animation and intimacy exhibited by the TI counselor.