Professional embodied conversational agents (ECAs) deployed in the market are dedicated to satisfying the digital customer relationship. However, ECAs still suffer from a lack of user adoption, in particular because most of them have few social skills. Inspired by social presence theories and based on the ergonomic components of user experience (CUE) model (Mahlke and Lindgaard, 2007), the paper focuses on one social skill, i.e., virtual intimacy, a 3-dimensional concept including honesty and genuineness, positivity and mutual comprehension. Virtual intimacy may be a way to reinforce the social dimension of human-agent interactions and to provide a better user experience. We therefore propose an interactive experiment that incorporates natural interactions between real tourists and an autonomously intimate virtual counselor who is an expert in tourism and able to express intimacy-related behaviors in verbal and nonverbal communication. The paper studies the impact of the agents expression of intimacy-related behaviors on the perception of virtual intimacy, social presence and the user experience. The results show that users adopt a social attitude toward the intimate counselor, and although they do not significantly perceive virtual intimacy, they clearly perceive the dimension of honesty and genuineness. Moreover, the agents expression of intimacy only enhances copresence, the first perceptive level of social presence. Except for user social status, which is enhanced, the user experience is also not significantly influenced by intimate expression. The study results further demonstrate that perceiving virtual intimacy is a good predictor of social presence and user experience, especially user emotional reactions. Perceiving virtual intimacy influences user experience independently of social presence, which thereby indicates that independent intimacy-related mechanisms, such as emotional contagion, may be involved. Mediation analyses also underline that perceiving virtual intimacy has a direct effect on user emotional reactions, but this finding is not supported by the CUE model. The findings in this study provide new evidence that perceiving virtual intimacy in human-agent interaction elicits emotions in users and enhances user experience. In line with this, we propose an outline for an ECA-adapted, user experience model based on the CUE model.

市场上部署的专业化会话代理（ECA）致力于满足数字客户关系。但是，ECA仍然缺乏用户采用的困扰，特别是因为它们大多数没有社交技能。受社会存在理论的启发，并基于用户体验（CUE）模型的人体工程学组成部分（Mahlke和Lindgaard，2007年），本文着重于一种社会技能，即虚拟亲密感，这是一个3维概念，包括诚实和真诚，积极和相互理解。虚拟亲密关系可能是增强人机交互的社会影响力并提供更好的用户体验的一种方式。因此，我们提出了一个互动实验，该互动实验融合了真实游客与自治的虚拟顾问之间的自然互动，该顾问是旅游业的专家，能够在言语和非言语交际中表达与亲密相关的行为。本文研究了与亲密相关的行为的代理表达对虚拟亲密感，社交存在和用户体验的影响。结果表明，用户对亲密的辅导员采取社交态度，尽管他们没有明显感觉到虚拟的亲密关系，他们清楚地意识到了诚实和真诚的程度。此外，代理人对亲密关系的表达只会增强共处感，这是社会存在的第一个感知水平。除了增强的用户社交状态之外，亲密表达也不会显着影响用户体验。研究结果进一步表明，感知虚拟亲密关系可以很好地预测社交存在和用户体验，尤其是用户的情感反应。感知虚拟亲密感会独立于社交存在而影响用户体验，从而表明可能涉及独立的与亲密感相关的机制，例如情绪传染。中介分析还强调，感知虚拟亲密关系对用户的情绪反应具有直接影响，但CUE模型不支持此发现。这项研究的发现提供了新的证据，表明在人与人之间的互动中感知虚拟亲密关系会激发用户的情绪并增强用户体验。与此相应，我们提出了基于CUE模型的，适合ECA的用户体验模型的大纲。