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In this paper, we present a study aimed at understanding whether the embodiment and humanlikeness of an artificial agent can affect people's spontaneous and instructed mimicry of its facial expressions. The study followed a mixed…
Social robots need to understand the affective state of the humans with whom they interact. Successful interactions require understanding mood and emotion in the short term, and personality and attitudes over longer periods. Social robots…
This article proposes an emotive lifelike robotic face, called ExpressionBot, that is designed to support verbal and non-verbal communication between the robot and humans, with the goal of closely modeling the dynamics of natural…
Textual conversational agent or chatbots' development gather tremendous traction from both academia and industries in recent years. Nowadays, chatbots are widely used as an agent to communicate with a human in some services such as booking…
Negotiation is a complex social interaction that encapsulates emotional encounters in human decision-making. Virtual agents that can negotiate with humans are useful in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of such…
In this paper, we present a methodology for the development of embodied conversational agents for social virtual worlds. The agents provide multimodal communication with their users in which speech interaction is included. Our proposal…
As chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, we often wonder what users perceive as natural and socially accepted manners of interacting with them. Some researchers maintain that humans should avoid engaging in emotional conversations…
This study investigates the elicitation of empathy toward a third party through interaction with social agents. Participants engaged with either a physical robot or a voice-enabled chatbot, both driven by a large language model (LLM)…
Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of…
As social robots and other artificial agents become more conversationally capable, it is important to understand whether the content and meaning of self-disclosure towards these agents changes depending on the agent's embodiment. In this…
Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly embedded in daily life, yet their ability to navigate user emotions efficiently is still evolving. This study investigates how users with varying traits -- gender, personality, and cultural…
Communication between humans and artificial agents is essential for their interaction. This is often inspired by human communication, which uses gestures, facial expressions, gaze direction, and other explicit and implicit means. This work…
In human interaction, gestures serve various functions such as marking speech rhythm, highlighting key elements, and supplementing information. These gestures are also observed in explanatory contexts. However, the impact of gestures on…
This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and…
When people try to influence others to do something, they subconsciously adjust their speech to include appropriate emotional information. In order for a robot to influence people in the same way, the robot should be able to imitate the…
A few decades of work in the AI field have focused efforts on developing a new generation of systems which can acquire knowledge via interaction with the world. Yet, until very recently, most such attempts were underpinned by research which…
Strategies are necessary to mitigate the impact of unexpected behavior in collaborative robotics, and research to develop solutions is lacking. Our aim here was to explore the benefits of an affective interaction, as opposed to a more…
Demographic growth and rise in the average age of the population is increasing the demand for the elderly assistance. Health care oriented ambient intelligence technologies are fundamental to support elderly peoples' autonomy. In this…
A virtual embodiment can benefit conversational agents, but it is unclear how their personalities and non-verbal behavior influence the User Experience and Social Presence in Augmented Reality (AR). We asked 30 users to converse with a…
Voice-based communication is often cited as one of the most `natural' ways in which humans and robots might interact, and the recent availability of accurate automatic speech recognition and intelligible speech synthesis has enabled…