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Party Hosts and Tour Guides 492.2 Evaluation of the Success of Helper AgentWe conducted an experiment to test the effectiveness of Helper Agent, inassisting in conversations between Japanese and American students. (For moreabout the method and results, please see Isbister, Nakanishi, Ishida, and Nass).People did engage with the agent. Most quickly grasped its purpose - acceptingthe agent as a valid participant, taking turns with it, and taking up its suggestions.3. Tour Guide Agent3.1 Designing Tour Guide AgentThe Tour Guide Agent project was part of Digital City Kyoto(http://www.digitalcity.gr.jp/). The tour was to be a point of entry to the onlineresource and to Kyoto, ideally increasing visitor interest in and use of the digitalcity. The tour was also designed to encourage dialogue and relationships amongparticipants, and to increase exposure to Kyoto’s history among friends andfamily of participants.To create the agent’s behavior, we observed tour guides, and read professionalmanuals on tour guide strategy (Pond). Strategies for storytelling thatwe imitated:1. Stories were told about particular locations while in front of them.2. Some stories included tales about previous tours.3. Stories were selected partly because they were easy and fun to retell.4. Guides adjusted timing and follow-up based on audience response.In our system, the digital tour-takers are all chatting in an online text environment,and use a simple 3-D control set to explore a virtual model of parts ofNijo Castle in Kyoto (see Figure 2). At each stop, the tour guide tells relatedstories, using gesture and expression to highlight key points.The agent tracks the quantity of conversation, and looks for positive andnegative keywords that indicate how visitors feel at the moment (negative wordssuch as "boring, dull, too long"; positive words such as "wow, cool, neat,interesting"). The agent selects stories using a very simple decision rule (seeFigure 3).To make sure the tour stops for the right duration, the agent moves to thenext stop only when a majority of tour-takers say they want to move forward.(For more about this project’s technical details, please see Isbister).3.2 Lessons LearnedThough we did not perform a formal evaluation, preliminary review of reactionsto the tour indicated that the agent’s stories were serving as a successfulspringboard for conversation, and worked nicely to supplement the visitors’experience of the virtual castle.