Towards the Embodied Conversational Interview Agentic Service ELIAS: Development and Evaluation of a First Prototype
Tobias Budig, Marcia Nißen, Tobias Kowatsch · 2025
Interviews in social and health sciences are resource intensive and susceptible to interviewer bias, inconsistency, and variability across interviewers.Moreover, human-led interviews may inhibit participant openness, especially regarding sensitive topics, due to judgment, compromised anonymity, or discomfort in face-toface interactions.These shortcomings limit the quality of the data collected.To this end, we propose the Embodied Conversational Interview Agentic Service (ELIAS).Informed by human-developed interview guides, ELIAS aims to streamline the interview process by combining an empathetic and bias-free embodied conversational interview agent with a semi-supervised content analysis and coding agent.We describe the development of the first version of ELIAS and also present results from a first evaluation study with five participants.We assessed the acceptance of and alliance with the embodied conversational interview agent.The evaluation shows positive perceptions and a strong alliance with the conversational agent.Suggestions for improvement will guide our future work.