# ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02325/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Nora: The Well-Being Coach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00410/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Negative Object Presence Evaluation (NOPE) to Measure Object Hallucination in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05338/) (2023)
- [An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17017/) (2023)
- [CAiRE in DialDoc21: Data Augmentation for Information-Seeking Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03530/) (2021)
- [A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16604/) (2022)
- [A Flexible Schema-Guided Dialogue Management Framework: From Friendly Peer to Virtual Standardized Cancer Patient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07276/) (2022)
- [Cross-Lingual Cross-Age Group Adaptation for Low-Resource Elderly Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14517/) (2023)
- [Survey of Design Paradigms for Social Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20556/) (2024)
- [Empathetic Response in Audio-Visual Conversations Using Emotion Preference Optimization and MambaCompressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17572/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has just started on dialogue systems. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of people under self-quarantine. We conduct a control simulation experiment to assess the effects of the user interface, a web-based virtual agent called Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the android offers a more valuable user experience by giving the impression of being more empathetic and engaging in the conversation due to its nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and body gestures.