Interacting with an embodied conversational agent (ECA) in a professional context addresses social considerations to satisfy customer-relationship. This paper presents an experimental study about the perception of virtual intimacy in human-ECA interactions. We explore how an ECA’s multimodal communication affects our perception of virtual intimacy. To this end, we developed a virtual Tourism Information counselor capable of exhibiting verbal and nonverbal intimate behaviors according to several modalities (voice, chatbox, both media), and we built a corpus of videos showing interactions between the agent and a human tourist. We interrogated observers about their perception of the agent’s level of intimacy. Our results confirm the human ability to perceive intimacy in an ECA displaying multimodal behaviors, although the contribution of nonverbal communication remains unclear. Our study suggests that using voice channel increases the perception of virtual intimacy and offers further evidence that human-inspired design of ECAs is needed. Finally, we demonstrate that intimate cues do not disturb the comprehension of task-related information and are valuable for an attentional focus on the agent’s animation. We discuss the concept of virtual intimacy in relation to interpersonal intimacy, and we question its perception in terms of attentional mechanisms.

在专业环境中与具体的对话代理（ECA）进行交互可以解决社会问题，从而满足客户关系。本文提出了一项关于人与ECA互动中虚拟亲密感的实验研究。我们探讨了ECA的多模式交流如何影响我们对虚拟亲密感的认识。为此，我们开发了一个虚拟的旅游信息咨询师，能够根据几种方式（语音，聊天框，两种媒体）展示言语和非言语的亲密行为，并且建立了一个视频语料库，用于显示代理商与人类游客之间的互动。我们向观察员询问他们对特工亲密程度的看法。我们的结果证实了人类在显示多峰行为的ECA中感知亲密的能力，尽管非语言交流的作用仍不清楚。我们的研究表明，使用语音通道可以增加对虚拟亲密感的认识，并提供进一步的证据表明需要以人为灵感的ECA设计。最后，我们证明了亲密线索不会打扰与任务相关的信息的理解，并且对于关注代理的动画非常有用。我们讨论与人际亲密相关的虚拟亲密的概念，并从注意力机制的角度质疑其知觉。我们证明了亲密线索不会打扰与任务相关的信息的理解，并且对于关注代理的动画非常有价值。我们讨论了与人际亲密相关的虚拟亲密的概念，并从注意力机制的角度质疑其知觉。我们证明了亲密线索不会打扰与任务相关的信息的理解，并且对于关注代理的动画非常有价值。我们讨论了与人际亲密相关的虚拟亲密的概念，并从注意力机制的角度质疑其知觉。