- Etiquette in Motivational Agents: Engaging Users and Developing Relationships
T I MOTH Y BICK MOR E · Auerbach Publications eBooks · 2010
Micro-analysis of face-to-face interaction among humans can tell us a great deal about how to design etiquette into our human-machine interfaces in order to make them more intuitive, robust, and easy to use. Human protocols for conversational turn-taking, indicating understanding, marking emphasis, and displaying presumed relationship status, are but a few of the myriad verbal and nonverbal cues that can be observed in face-to-face interaction and incorporated into our systems. However, one of the most interesting-and challengingaspects of human interaction for both analysis and emulation is that the “rules of engagement”—that is, etiquette-expectations change frequently and ©uidly during a single encounter. A person must know if their interlocutor is engaging in serious talk, social chat, play, storytelling, or joke-telling to know how to interpret their behavior and to respond appropriately. In addition, these rules can also slowly evolve as a pair of interlocutors develops a relationship over time. is chapter will discuss these phenomena in human social interactions and their rami£cations for developing human-like machine interfaces such as the animated health counselor shown in Figure 9.1. is work focuses on a particular type of application as a motivating example-the use of computerized animated counselors for long-term health behavior change interventions-and why at least some of the interaction styles that are e¡ective in this domain comprise rules of etiquette that would not be considered “nice” by Emily Post.