Re-embodiment and co-embodiment: Exploration of social presence for robots and conversational agents

Abstract

Interactions with multiple conversational agents and social robots are becoming increasingly common. This raises new design challenges: Should agents and robots be modeled after humans, presenting their entity (i.e., social presence) as bound to a single body, or should they take advantage of non-human capabilities, such as moving their social presence from body to body across service touchpoints and contexts? We conducted a User Enactments study in which participants interacted with agents that had one social presence per body, that could re-embody (move their social presence from body to body), and that could co-embody (move their social presence into a body that already contains another). Reactions showed that participants felt comfortable with re-embodying agents, who created more seamless and efficient experiences. Yet situations that required expertise or concentration raised concerns about non-human behaviors. We report on our insights regarding collaboration and coordination with several agents in multi-step interactions.