Evaluating an adaptive dialog system for the public

An embodied conversational agent was developed implementing four strategies to adapt to the user: User tracking and recognition with a camera, remembering interests in topics, remembering preferences concerning the level of detail of information, and changes in confirmation strategy. The agent was integrated into a system providing public information on ICT related projects of research and development for visitors of the laboratories. In an interactive experiment, the adaptive version was compared to a non-adaptive version. The logging data, but not the questionnaire data, shows significant differences, indicating a benefit of the adaptive version in terms of efficiency in interaction. The logging data and results from a final interview are discussed in relation to other work on this subject, concluding on the difficulties to provide not only more efficient interaction, but also higher User Experience.