Virtual rapport

  • Authors:

  • Jonathan Gratch;Anna Okhmatovskaia;Francois Lamothe;Stacy Marsella;Mathieu Morales;R. J. van der Werf;Louis-Philippe Morency

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Southern California;University of Southern California;Ecole Spéciale Militaire de St-Cyr;University of Southern California;Ecole Spéciale Militaire de St-Cyr;University of Twente;Massachusetts institute of technology

  • Venue:
  • IVA'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Effective face-to-face conversations are highly interactive. Participants respond to each other, engaging in nonconscious behavioral mimicry and backchanneling feedback. Such behaviors produce a subjective sense of rapport and are correlated with effective communication, greater liking and trust, and greater influence between participants. Creating rapport requires a tight sense-act loop that has been traditionally lacking in embodied conversational agents. Here we describe a system, based on psycholinguistic theory, designed to create a sense of rapport between a human speaker and virtual human listener. We provide empirical evidence that it increases speaker fluency and engagement.