An intelligent virtual agent to increase involvement in financial services

Abstract

In order to enhance user involvement in financial services, this paper proposes to combine the idea of adaptive personalisation with intelligent virtual agents. To this end, a computational model for human decision making in financial context is incorporated within an intelligent virtual agent. To test whether the agent enhances user involvement, a web application has been developed, in which users have to make a number of investment decisions. This application has been evaluated in an experiment for a number of participants interacting with the system and afterwards providing their judgement by means of a questionnaire. The preliminary results indicate that the virtual agent can show appropriate emotional expressions related to states like happiness, greed and fear, and has high potential to enhance user involvement.