Establishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships

TLDR: The meaning of “human-computer relationship” is investigated and techniques for constructing, maintaining, and evaluating such relationships are presented, based on research in social psychology, sociolinguistics, communication and other social sciences.

Abstract: This research investigates the meaning of “human-computer relationship” and presents techniques for constructing, maintaining, and evaluating such relationships, based on research in social psychology, sociolinguistics, communication and other social sciences Contexts in which relationships are particularly important are described, together with specific benefits (like trust) and task outcomes (like improved learning) known to be associated with relationship quality We especially consider the problem of designing for long-term interaction, and define relational agents as computational artifacts designed to establish and maintain long-term social-emotional relationships with their users We construct the first such agent, and evaluate it in a controlled experiment with 101 users who were asked to interact daily with an exercise adoption system for a month Compared to an equivalent task-oriented agent without any deliberate social-emotional or relationship-building skills, the relational agent was respected more, liked more, and trusted more, even after four weeks of interaction Additionally, users expressed a significantly greater desire to continue working with the relational agent after the termination of the study We conclude by discussing future directions for this research together with ethical and other ramifications of this work for HCI designers