Reducing Task Load with an Embodied Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Improved Performance in Collaborative Decision Making

Collaboration in a group has the potential to achieve more effective solutions for challenging problems, but collaboration per se is not an easy task, rather a stressful burden if the collaboration partners do not communicate well with each other. While Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs), such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming part of our daily lives, there are increasing occurrences in which we collaborate with such IVAs for our daily tasks. Although IVAs can provide important support to users, the limited verbal interface in the current state of IVAs lacks the ability to provide effective non-verbal social cues, which is critical for improving collaborative performance and reducing task load.In this paper, we investigate the effects of IVA embodiment on collaborative decision making. In a within-subjects study, participants performed a desert survival task in three conditions: (1) performing the task alone, (2) working with a disembodied voice assistant, and (3) working with an embodied assistant. Our results show that both assistant conditions led to higher performance over when performing the task alone, but interestingly the reported task load with the embodied assistant was significantly lower than with the disembodied voice assistant. We discuss the findings with implications for effective and efficient collaborations with IVAs while also emphasizing the increased social presence and richness of the embodied assistant.