ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine
This addresses the social isolation problem for individuals in quarantine during the pandemic, but it is incremental as it builds on existing dialogue system research with a specific application.
The paper tackled the problem of easing isolation for people under COVID-19 quarantine by developing an end-to-end dialogue system, and the result showed that the android ERICA provided a more valuable user experience, being perceived as more empathetic and engaging than a web-based agent due to nonverbal cues like facial expressions and body gestures.
Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has just started on dialogue systems. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of people under self-quarantine. We conduct a control simulation experiment to assess the effects of the user interface, a web-based virtual agent called Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the android offers a more valuable user experience by giving the impression of being more empathetic and engaging in the conversation due to its nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and body gestures.