ERICA : An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine (2021)

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, Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the android can offer 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.

## introduction to combat the covid-19 pandemic, lockdowns have been imposed around the world, leading many to experience social isolation. many people have also undergone weeks of mandatory self-quarantine as they crossed a border or had close contact with a patient. the resulting social loneliness can affect people's mental state, and mental support for those under isolation is suggested @xcite . for more than half a century, dialogue systems have played the role of therapist, psychologist or counselor @xcite , and many were designed to help people with a specific concern @xcite . hence, dialogue systems have a role in helping curb the effects of social isolation arising from the pandemic. to meet the emerging needs arising from the pandemic, we extend the idea of nora, an empathetic dialogue system which mimics a conversation with a psychologist @xcite , to specifically mentally support people under selfquarantine, and we install her dialogue system into the autonomous android erica @xcite . we utilize erica's nonverbal features, which are not offered by nora, to improve the user interface (ui), because it is well-accepted that the nonverbal behavior of clinicians and therapists affects the outcome of patients @xcite . during the conversation session, our system asks a set of questions to screen for stress and depression as well as health conditions such as body temperature or shortness of breath. we conduct a comparative study of the virtual agents between the web-based nora and android erica, and we design a dialogue flow particularly for quarantined users based on nora's graphical ui. the experimental results show that nonverbal information actually enhances the quality of the user experience during the session by giving the user the impression he or she is being empathized with and listened to. this suggests the importance of the design of nonverbal behavior in dialogue agents, especially for those in the mental health care domain. ## conversational agents here we describe the end-to-end system for the nora web-based virtual agent and the android er-ica, whose architectures are depicted in figure 1 . ## experiments we conducted a comparative evaluation to see how nonverbal information such as facial expressions and body gestures affect the user experience by asking volunteers to participate in a session with the nora virtual agent and erica. ## related work one of the major challenges in dialogue systems is how to incorporate empathy, and several papers have explored approaches for end-to-end chatbots @xcite . empathetic dialogue systems are attracting more interest in the field of psychiatry as well @xcite , especially those equipped with nonverbal features @xcite . in addition, @xcite utilized er-ica's nonverbal features to make her more empathetic in more generic situations. ## conclusion in this paper, we described the implementation of the nora dialogue system and its application in the android erica. a comparison of erica against nora shows that the facial expressions and body gestures of erica give a better impression of attentiveness and empathy, even though erica has technical drawbacks such as delayed response and worse asr quality than nora. these results suggest that nonverbal communication is crucial for machine-to-human conversation as for human-tohuman conversation, and special care is needed to design the nonverbal behaviors of empathetic dialogue systems.