TY - GEN
T1 - More general evaluation of a client-centered counseling agent
AU - Horii, Tsubasa
AU - Sakurai, Yoshitaka
AU - Sakurai, Eriko
AU - Tsuruta, Setsuo
AU - Knauf, Rainer
AU - Damiani, Ernesto
AU - Kutics, Andrea
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP15K00349, JP15K00382. We thank students of Cognitive Robotics Lab, Muroran Institute of Technology, Distributed Intelligent Systems Lab, Tokyo Denki University, for their help with developing our system.
Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP15K00349, JP15K00382. We thank students of Cognitive Robotics Lab, Muroran Institute of Technology, Distributed Intelligent Systems Lab, Tokyo Denki University, for their help with developing our system.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/7
Y1 - 2019/7
N2 - A lot of people in Japan suffer from bad conditions of their mental health with an increasing tendency, in particular jobseekers and elderly persons. The classical way to solve their problem is to consult a counselor, who treats these people in a way to become aware of the core of their problem and to solve it. However, the number of well qualified counselors is limited. For this purpose, we developed a VCA (Virtual Counseling Agent) as a further evolution of a formerly developed CRECA (Context Respectful Counseling Agent). CRECA had a text interface. To much more imitate a human counselor, VCA has an image avatar and a voice conversation using the Google Cloud audio API. Further, VCA is made independent of counseling content fields. Thus, it is more generalized than CRECA or ELIZA in order for every people to easily use everywhere in every situation. Here, VCA, CRECA, and ELIZA are comparatively evaluated by questionnaire after the use of 10 college students having career problems as well as elderly persons struggling with modern IT. As a result, VCA significantly exceeded the average value of ELIZA along with the significant difference at the level of 5%. Moreover, average of the evaluation value is not worse than CRECA. Compared to CRECA, VCA does not limit the content and field of consultation. Especially, elderly persons struggling with modern IT could not use CRECA that have only text interface. It can be used generally at any time in everyday natural conversation. It can easily be used by elderly people and the digital divided due to voice conversion.
AB - A lot of people in Japan suffer from bad conditions of their mental health with an increasing tendency, in particular jobseekers and elderly persons. The classical way to solve their problem is to consult a counselor, who treats these people in a way to become aware of the core of their problem and to solve it. However, the number of well qualified counselors is limited. For this purpose, we developed a VCA (Virtual Counseling Agent) as a further evolution of a formerly developed CRECA (Context Respectful Counseling Agent). CRECA had a text interface. To much more imitate a human counselor, VCA has an image avatar and a voice conversation using the Google Cloud audio API. Further, VCA is made independent of counseling content fields. Thus, it is more generalized than CRECA or ELIZA in order for every people to easily use everywhere in every situation. Here, VCA, CRECA, and ELIZA are comparatively evaluated by questionnaire after the use of 10 college students having career problems as well as elderly persons struggling with modern IT. As a result, VCA significantly exceeded the average value of ELIZA along with the significant difference at the level of 5%. Moreover, average of the evaluation value is not worse than CRECA. Compared to CRECA, VCA does not limit the content and field of consultation. Especially, elderly persons struggling with modern IT could not use CRECA that have only text interface. It can be used generally at any time in everyday natural conversation. It can easily be used by elderly people and the digital divided due to voice conversion.
KW - Counseling Agent.
KW - Digitally Divided Elderly People.
KW - Distress.
KW - Image Avatar.
KW - Virtual Counseling Agent.
KW - Voice Conversation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85072766284&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/SERVICES.2019.00052
DO - 10.1109/SERVICES.2019.00052
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85072766284
T3 - Proceedings - 2019 IEEE World Congress on Services, SERVICES 2019
SP - 190
EP - 196
BT - Proceedings - 2019 IEEE World Congress on Services, SERVICES 2019
A2 - Chang, Carl K.
A2 - Chen, Peter
A2 - Goul, Michael
A2 - Oyama, Katsunori
A2 - Reiff-Marganiec, Stephan
A2 - Sun, Yanchun
A2 - Wang, Shangguang
A2 - Wang, Zhongjie
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2019 IEEE World Congress on Services, SERVICES 2019
Y2 - 8 July 2019 through 13 July 2019
ER -
