Design and evaluation of a conversational agent for the touristic domain

Andreea I. Niculescu, Kheng Hui Yeo, Luis F. D'Haro, Seokhwan Kim, Ridong Jiang, Rafael E. Banchs

Abstract: This paper focuses on the design and evaluation of SARA, a conversational agent for the touristic domain featuring a high number of different, unique characteristics: spoken dialogue interaction, dialogue orchestration, context dependent information, an animated avatar and support for different kind of dialogue types, i.e. chat, specific and general question-answering, task oriented dialogues. The agent has currently two implementations: as web client and as mobile phone application. The paper describes the modules and resources required for running the agent on both interfaces, as well as the evaluation results obtained from two assessment studies concerning the interaction design of these two agent interfaces. The feedback gathered from the studies will enable us to improve the applications in terms of service, performance and usability.