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ECA’s In E-Commerce Applications 2734. Conclusions & Future ResearchEstablishing trust between the agent and the user is of great importance,and on-going research [4] is exploring the construction of a social relationshipto assist with establishing trust. Unless users are confident that the agent canunderstand and process information correctly they may be less likely to trust it,resulting in a less effective interaction. In the study by van Mulken et al [12]results showed personification of interfaces does not appear to be sufficient forraising trustworthiness. If this is the case what other methods could be usedfor establishing trust in e-commerce applications?The use of text in the interface could be used to provide feedback to theuser about the information the agents have received and processed and mayimprove user confidence. Allowing the use of keyboard entry in conjunctionwith speech input, especially when entering security details may also be animprovement. Using the same experimental platform described for this experiment,text-input and text-output will be added to the system in order to furtherthe research aspects of user confidence to ECA’s in e-commerce applications.Research suggests the development of ECA’s in all domains will be dictatednot only by technological advances but also by advances in the understandingand creation of the social interaction between the agent and user, in particularthe establishment of trust.AcknowledgmentsThanks to colleagues at CCIR for helpful comments, in particular Prof. M.A. Jack and Dr.J.C. Foster. Sincere gratitude is also expressed to Dr. J.A. Anderson for developing the dialoguemanager software.References[1] E. Andre and T. Rist. Personalising the user interface: Projects on life-like characters atDFKI. In Proc. 3rd Workshop on Conversational Characters, 167–170, October 1998.[2] N. Badler, R. Bindiganavale, J. Allbeck, W. Schuler, L. Zhao, and M. Palmer. Parameterizedaction representation for virtual human agents. In J. Cassell, et al. (eds.), EmbodiedConversational Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.[3] G. Ball and J. Breese. Emotion and personality in a conversational agent. In J. Cassell,et al. (eds.), Embodied Conversational Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.[4] T. Bickmore and J. Cassell. How about this weather? Social dialogue with embodiedconversational agents. In Proc. AAAI Fall Symposium: Socially Intelligent Agents, 4–8,November 2000.[5] M. Bricken. Virtual worlds: No interface to design. Technical Report R-90-2. WashingtonTechnology Center, WA, 1990.[6] J. Cassell, et al. (eds.). Embodied Conversational Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,2000.