This paper discusses our recent studies on Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) design strategies to encourage credible and trustworthy dialogue. We approach the problem from two specific directions: the embodiment that the character 'wears' during its interchange with the user, and the method of interaction used by the ECA to engage the user. Our results indicate that while users generally prefer to interact with a youthful character matching their ethnicity, no significant preferences were indicated for character gender. For interaction, our results indicated that a character that portrayed trusting nonverbal behaviors was rated as being significantly more credible than a character portraying no nonverbal behavior, or one that portrayed non-trusting behaviors. Other interesting results from this work are also discussed.
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