Enhancing domestic communications through human-like social intelligence designs

In this paper we describe a study of the concept of social intelligence in perspectives of developing a communication agent within domestic scenarios. The study employs a methodology which is called Wizard of Oz (WoZ) to investigate the effectiveness of building up relationships between people through the intelligent communication agent as well as to understand designs and evaluations of such system with some social intelligence. Since designing intelligent systems with human-likeness progresses slowly under current technology conditions, we adopt the WoZ methodology to simulate complementary components of the system. From experiment observations and metadata analysis, our results show that designing a communication agent with social intelligence can rapidly build up relationships between people even those of strangers, and this also enhances people’s intentions of further engagements which may trigger some social behaviour in relation to communications such like sharing some feelings of using the system.