Can user engagement affect trust in audio guide agent?

This paper describes how user engagement affects their trust in audio guide agents to adapt to their environment. Audio guide agents are expected to be used more in the future because they can perform without interrupting the user’s actions, even when the user is in action. Because agents adapt to their environment and users work collaboratively with each other, trust in the agent is important. Therefore, we examined whether adaptation itself affects trust and whether intentional user operations as a means of user engagement affect trust. A participant experiment was conducted with two independent variables, the degree of adaptation to ambient noise and the availability of user operation, and the subjective evaluation of the impression of the agent as the dependent variable. For the factor of adaptability, agents with low noise cancellation performance and agents with high noise cancellation performance were provided. For the factor of user operation, we set whether or not to provide the user with volume adjustment functions for ambient noise. Regarding the agent’s impression, it was verified that users perceive the agent as more intelligent and human-like only when the agent’s adaptation to the environment is low. However adaptation of the agent could increase trust in the agent, and trust was also increased by intentional user operations regardless of the agent’s adaptation level. In systems where users and agents work collaboratively, the results suggest that intentionally increasing user engagement may increase trust in the agent.