Nudge Nudge Wink Wink: Elements of Face-to-Face Conversation for Embodied Conversational Agents
Justine Cassell · The MIT Press eBooks · 2000
Introduction Only humans communicate using language and carry on conversations with one another. And the skills of conversation have developed in humans in such a way as to exploit all of the unique affordances of the human body. We make complex representational gestures with our prehensile hands, gaze away and towards one another out of the corners of our centrally set eyes, and use the pitch and melody of our voices to emphasize and clarify what we are saying. Perhaps because conversation is so defining of humanness and human interaction, the metaphor of face-to-face conversation has been applied to human-computer interface design for quite some time. One of the early arguments for the utility of this metaphor gave a list of features of face-to-face conversation that could be applied fruitfully to human-computer interaction, including mixed initiative, nonverbal communication, sense of presence, rules for transfer of control (Nickerson 1976). However, although these feature