TY - JOUR
T1 - VICA, a visual counseling agent for emotional distress
AU - Sakurai, Yoshitaka
AU - Ikegami, Yukino
AU - Sakai, Motoki
AU - Fujikawa, Hiroshi
AU - Tsuruta, Setsuo
AU - Gonzalez, Avelino J.
AU - Sakurai, Eriko
AU - Damiani, Ernesto
AU - Kutics, Andrea
AU - Knauf, Rainer
AU - Frati, Fulvio
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP15K00349, JP15K00382 and by Artificial Intelligence Research Promotion Foundation. We thank the students of the Distributed Intelligent Systems Lab, Tokyo Denki University Japan and of the Machine Learning Systems Lab, Meiji University Japan for their dedicated help to VICA implementation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - We present VICA, a Visual Counseling Agent designed to create an engaging multimedia face-to-face interaction. VICA is a human-friendly agent equipped with high-performance voice conversation designed to help psychologically stressed users, to offload their emotional burden. Such users specifically include non-computer-savvy elderly persons or clients. Our agent builds replies exploiting interlocutor’s utterances expressing such as wishes, obstacles, emotions, etc. Statements asking for confirmation, details, emotional summary, or relations among such expressions are added to the utterances. We claim that VICA is suitable for positive counseling scenarios where multimedia specifically high-performance voice communication is instrumental for even the old or digital divided users to continue dialogue towards their self-awareness. To prove this claim, VICA’s effect is evaluated with respect to a previous text-based counseling agent CRECA and ELIZA including its successors. An experiment involving 14 subjects shows VICA effects as follows: (i) the dialogue continuation (CPS: Conversation-turns Per Session) of VICA for the older half (age > 40) substantially improved 53% to CRECA and 71% to ELIZA. (ii) VICA’s capability to foster peace of mind and other positive feelings was assessed with a very high score of 5 or 6 mostly, out of 7 stages of the Likert scale, again by the older. Compared on average, such capability of VICA for the older is 5.14 while CRECA (all subjects are young students, age < 25) is 4.50, ELIZA is 3.50, and the best of ELIZA’s successors for the older (> 25) is 4.41.
AB - We present VICA, a Visual Counseling Agent designed to create an engaging multimedia face-to-face interaction. VICA is a human-friendly agent equipped with high-performance voice conversation designed to help psychologically stressed users, to offload their emotional burden. Such users specifically include non-computer-savvy elderly persons or clients. Our agent builds replies exploiting interlocutor’s utterances expressing such as wishes, obstacles, emotions, etc. Statements asking for confirmation, details, emotional summary, or relations among such expressions are added to the utterances. We claim that VICA is suitable for positive counseling scenarios where multimedia specifically high-performance voice communication is instrumental for even the old or digital divided users to continue dialogue towards their self-awareness. To prove this claim, VICA’s effect is evaluated with respect to a previous text-based counseling agent CRECA and ELIZA including its successors. An experiment involving 14 subjects shows VICA effects as follows: (i) the dialogue continuation (CPS: Conversation-turns Per Session) of VICA for the older half (age > 40) substantially improved 53% to CRECA and 71% to ELIZA. (ii) VICA’s capability to foster peace of mind and other positive feelings was assessed with a very high score of 5 or 6 mostly, out of 7 stages of the Likert scale, again by the older. Compared on average, such capability of VICA for the older is 5.14 while CRECA (all subjects are young students, age < 25) is 4.50, ELIZA is 3.50, and the best of ELIZA’s successors for the older (> 25) is 4.41.
KW - Avatar
KW - Conversational agent
KW - Dialogue continuation
KW - Self-awareness
KW - Visual counseling agent
KW - Voice conversation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85060049724&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s12652-019-01180-x
DO - 10.1007/s12652-019-01180-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85060049724
SN - 1868-5137
VL - 10
SP - 4993
EP - 5005
JO - Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing
JF - Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing
IS - 12
ER -