Abstract
The construction of embodied conversational agents is an ambitious, complex, and essentially interdisciplinary process. This is inevitable given the depth, sophistication, and many modalities of the products we seek to create. Other chapters in this book address methods for evaluating ECAs as artefacts or according to their usability. In this chapter, we offer a complementary perspective: grounding the evaluation of ECAs in the context of the different disciplines that have merged to create the research community constructing them.
Different research areas have different goals and criteria for success, and without understanding what these are and how they relate, we cannot intelligently recognise what contributions other groups are making, a necessary requirement for integrating work done on one aspect of ECAs with work on another. Our goal is to help our community ultimately to create the high-quality interdisciplinary products necessary for this discipline to mature.
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Isbister, K., Doyle, P. (2004). The Blind Men and the Elephant Revisited. In: Ruttkay, Z., Pelachaud, C. (eds) From Brows to Trust. Human-Computer Interaction Series, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2730-3_1
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