Experimental Evaluation of the Use of ECAs in ecommerce Applications

This chapter describes an experimental approach to the evaluation of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) within eCommerce contexts and exemplifies the approach with three case studies. Results are presented from three experiments into the usability of eCommerce applications employing 3D ECAs within the domain of eRetail and eBanking.

The findings described here confirm user preferences for applications in which the agent acts as a conversational partner compared with a non-visual telephone application using speech recognition. Further, data in this chapter confirm the positive role of ECAs in interfaces and the benefits to that role of adding other modalities such as text output.