The Impact of a Conversational Agent Avatar on the Experience of Museum Visitors

We report on a conversational agent presented as an avatar on a TV and deployed inside a science museum in 2021. The avatar, Ilse, could answer questions about herself, the institutions she was connected to (the local university, the nearby lab, the museum), and a relevant science area (linguistics). We compared conversational interactions from 118 visitors to those visitors’ assessments of their own experiences. The interactions were similar to previous results from similar conversational agents: visitors often asked the avatar about herself and the avatar provided high-quality responses around half the time. Visitors’ survey responses showed that they enjoyed their interactions with the avatar, finding them easy and helpful. However, visitors who had received more high-quality responses from the avatar rated their subjective experiences significantly more positively. These results show the power of using conversational agents for public engagement and the importance of maintaining the underlying technology at a high level.