Designing a Multimodal Emotional Interface in the Context of Negotiation

This paper examines whether a virtual assistant with emotional intelligence improves the Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) in the specific use case of price negotiations. We propose a schema for an Emotional Interface, which we derive from the Skills-Rules-Knowledge (SRK)-Model and the Four Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence. According to this schema, a prototype of a virtual assistant with emotional intelligence is constructed. An avatar is used for representing the respective emotions by means of prosody and facial expression. The prototype is compared to a conventional digital assistant in a within-subject design study regarding user experience and trust building. The findings show that emotions animated in the mimic of the avatar cannot be clearly identified and attributed. Nevertheless, the User Experience of the prototype outperforms the conventional digital assistant, which is mainly due to the hedonic quality dimension. The study did not find any difference in trust between the emotional and the conventional digital assistant. This provides several interesting future research directions which are outlined in this paper.