An Empathic Virtual Buddy for Social Support

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in employing Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) as companions or coaches. These roles are typically performed by humans and require exhibiting certain social behaviors, such as providing social support. For interactions between users and coaching or companion ECAs to become truly social, providing social support is one of the tasks these agents should be able to perform. Social support can be defined as alleviating the emotional distress of another person. This thesis proposes a design for an 'empathic virtual buddy' that provides social support to victims of cyberbullying. It presents the underlying principles and an architecture for a prototype system, and provides both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the support conveyed by the empathic virtual buddy prototype.