PaolaChat: A Virtual Agent with Naturalistic Breathing

For embodied conversational agents (ECAs) the relationship between gesture and rapport is an open question. To enable us to learn whether adding breathing behaviors to an agent similar to SimSensei would lead users interacting to perceive the agent as more natural, we built an application, called Paola Chat, in which the ECA could display naturalistic breathing animations. Our study had two phases. In the first phase, we determined the most natural amplitude for the agent’s breathing. In the second phase, we assessed the effect of breathing on the users’ perceptions of rapport and naturalness. The study had a within-subjects design, with breathing/not-breathing as the independent variable. Despite our expectation that increased naturalness from breathing would lead users to report greater rapport in the breathing condition than in the not-breathing condition, the study’s results suggest that the animation of breathing appears to neither increase nor decrease these perceptions.