AIbot: Do Virtual Worlds Strengthen the Credibility of Artificially Intelligent Bots?

This paper presents AIbot, an assistant system for helping the exploration and fruition of distance didactic activities in Virtual Worlds. The proposed automatic assistant aims at reaching a natural appearance and a usual interaction style: it concretizes in an avatar, the typical character that habitually represents users during their Virtual World experiences. The utilization of an AIML engine lets AIbot to interact with users in a quasi natural manner and using the ordinary text chat channels. Aiming at evaluating how the Virtual World environment influences user perceptions of artificial intelligence, a controlled experiment has been performed as a modified Turing test: the users randomly interact with a human controlled avatar and with AIbot aiming at understanding the nature of the interlocutor intelligence between human or programmed. Results are really positive and provide interesting suggestions on the adoption of automatic user assistant systems in Virtual Worlds.