Embodied conversational agents are often included in health behaviour change applications as intelligent virtual coaches. A major challenge in their development is tailoring coaching dialogues to user profiles. Agents should collect information about the user and consequently adapt the strategy that guides their interactions.

Previous research discovered relations between users’ motivation profiles and potential effective coaching strategies. In the current paper, we describe an experiment with multiple agents that tests if users with certain motivation profiles prefer certain (tailored) strategies.

Participants were classified into four motivation groups (Intrinsic Motivation, External Regulation, Dual Motivation, A-motivation), following their responses to a questionnaire on motivation towards healthy living. Then, two coaches suggested a positively and a negatively tailored strategy. Participants rated these and chose their favourite.

Results (N = 108) show that the Dual Motivation group appreciated their positively tailored strategy more than their negatively tailored strategy, while intrinsically motivated participants appreciated both strategies. Furthermore, agents' likeability does not seem to influence strategy appreciation, while there was an effect of participant's age and gender.

We conclude that coaching strategies for dialogues with agents can be tailored to personal motivation to live healthy. Future research should focus on performing a long-term study in a real-life setting.

在健康行为更改应用程序中，通常将体现的对话代理作为智能虚拟教练来提供。他们的发展面临的主要挑战是根据用户个人资料定制教练对话。代理应收集有关用户的信息，并因此调整指导其交互的策略。

先前的研究发现了用户的动机概况和潜在的有效教练策略之间的关系。在当前的论文中，我们描述了一个具有多个代理的实验，该实验测试具有特定动机配置文件的用户是否偏爱某些（量身定制的）策略。

参与者按照对健康生活动机的问卷的回答后，分为四个动机组（内在动机，外部调节，双重动机，A动机）。然后，两名教练提出了积极和消极的量身定制的策略。参与者对这些产品进行了评分，并选择了他们的最爱。

结果（N  = 108）表明，双重动机组对他们的积极量身定制的策略比对他们的消极量身定制的策略更欣赏，而内在动机的参与者则对这两种策略都表示赞赏。此外，虽然参与者的年龄和性别会产生影响，但特工的可喜度似乎并不会影响策略的欣赏。

我们得出的结论是，与代理人对话的教练策略可以根据个人动机进行调整，以保持健康。未来的研究应着重于在现实生活中进行长期研究。