2025/07/29 by Fu‐Chia Yang, Siqi Guo, Christos Mousas · 1 voice
Computer Science · Psychology · #AI in Service Interactions #Social Robot Interaction and HRI #Speech and dialogue systems
paper · doi:10.1145/3757062
openalex publication_date 2025/07/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
In this study, we examined the impact of agent familiarity and knowledgeability on several variables spanning agent perceptions (i.e., perceived knowledge, familiarity, trust, anthropomorphism, uncanny valley effect, and likability), social and emotional experiences (i.e., co-presence, rapport, cognitive process expectations, and willingness for future interaction), and conversation dynamics (i.e., conversation transcript, participants’ response word count, and response time). We created two virtual agents for the study: a digital replica of a professor from our department (i.e., familiar agent) and an agent with similar demographic variables (i.e., age, gender, and ethnicity) but with a fabricated appearance and voice (i.e., unfamiliar agent). We implemented both agents to exhibit two levels of knowledgeability (i.e., low and high) in the domain of game development and course-specific information. We used large language models (LLMs) to provide the agents with persona information and domain knowledge through prompt engineering. For our user study, we followed a 2 (familiarity: unfamiliar vs. familiar agent) \(×\) 2 (knowledgeability: low vs. high knowledgeability) within-group study design and recruited 32 participants who engaged in a 5-minute, conversation-based virtual reality (VR) interaction with all four experimental conditions: unfamiliar agent with low knowledgeability (ULK), unfamiliar agent with high knowledgeability (UHK), familiar agent with low knowledgeability (FLK), and familiar agent with high knowledgeability (FHK). The findings demonstrated a significant main effect of agent familiarity on perceived knowledge, suggesting that familiarity plays a crucial role in shaping users’ perception of the agent’s knowledgeability level. Besides perceived knowledge, familiarity also affected all other variables, apart from co-presence. Conversely, agent knowledgeability affected perceived familiarity, trust, anthropomorphism, cognitive process expectations, willingness for future interaction, conversation content, and participants’ response word count. Finally, we found an interaction effect between agent familiarity and perceived knowledge, indicating that familiarity has a significant influence on users’ perceptions of the agent’s knowledgeability. This study contributes to the field of conversational human-agent interaction in VR by providing empirical evidence on how adapting both familiarity and knowledgeability of virtual agents can significantly enhance user experience, offering valuable insights into designing more engaging, trustworthy, and effective embodied conversational agents.