A virtual tourist counselor expressing intimacy behaviors : A new perspective to create emotion in visitors and offer them a better user experience?

Abstract Professional embodied conversational agents (ECAs) deployed in the market are dedicated to satisfying the digital customer relationship. However, ECAs still suffer from a lack of user adoption, in particular because most of them have few social skills. Inspired by social presence theories and based on the ergonomic components of user experience (CUE) model (Mahlke and Lindgaard, 2007), the paper focuses on one social skill, i.e., virtual intimacy, a 3-dimensional concept including honesty and genuineness, positivity and mutual comprehension. Virtual intimacy may be a way to reinforce the social dimension of human-agent interactions and to provide a better user experience. We therefore propose an interactive experiment that incorporates natural interactions between real tourists and an autonomously intimate virtual counselor who is an expert in tourism and able to express intimacy-related behaviors in verbal and nonverbal communication. The paper studies the impact of the agent’s expression of intimacy-related behaviors on the perception of virtual intimacy, social presence and the user experience. The results show that users adopt a social attitude toward the intimate counselor, and although they do not significantly perceive virtual intimacy, they clearly perceive the dimension of honesty and genuineness. Moreover, the agent’s expression of intimacy only enhances copresence, the first perceptive level of social presence. Except for user social status, which is enhanced, the user experience is also not significantly influenced by intimate expression. The study results further demonstrate that perceiving virtual intimacy is a good predictor of social presence and user experience, especially user emotional reactions. Perceiving virtual intimacy influences user experience independently of social presence, which thereby indicates that independent intimacy-related mechanisms, such as emotional contagion, may be involved. Mediation analyses also underline that perceiving virtual intimacy has a direct effect on user emotional reactions, but this finding is not supported by the CUE model. The findings in this study provide new evidence that perceiving virtual intimacy in human-agent interaction elicits emotions in users and enhances user experience. In line with this, we propose an outline for an ECA-adapted, user experience model based on the CUE model.