ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine

TL;DR

This paper presents ERICA, an empathetic android companion designed to alleviate the loneliness of individuals in COVID-19 quarantine, demonstrating that androids with nonverbal cues enhance user engagement and empathy.

Contribution

Introduces ERICA, an end-to-end empathetic android dialogue system that improves user experience through nonverbal communication during quarantine.

Findings

Android ERICA provides more empathetic interactions than web-based agents.

Nonverbal cues like facial expressions increase user engagement.

Android interface enhances perceived empathy in quarantine support.

Abstract

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.