Evaluating humanoid synthetic agents in e-retail applications

This paper presents three experiments designed to empirically evaluate humanoid synthetic agents in electronic retail applications. First, human-like agents were evaluated in a single e-retail application, a home furnishings service. The second experiment explored application dependency effects by evaluating the same human-like agents in a different e-retail application, a personalized CD service. The third experiment evaluated the effectiveness of a range of humanoid cartoon-like agents. Participants eavesdropped on spoken dialogues between a "customer" and each of the agents, which played the role of conversational sales assistants. Results showed participants expected a high level of realistic human-like verbal and nonverbal communicative behavior from the human-like agents. Overall ratings of the agents showed no significant application dependency. Further results showed participants have a preference for 3D rather than 2D cartoon-like agents and have a desire to interact with fully embodied agents.