Active Listening in Virtual Interactive Coaching: Prompt Strategies and User Assessment

For Conversational Agents (CA) to live up to their potential in supporting behaviour change for good, it is essential that high levels of appropriate conversational skills be applied in a systematic and controllable way. In light of this challenge, we present a model and study of the role of Active Listening in virtual health coaches. We detail the design and parameterization of AMOS, an LLM driven virtual health coach, and present a 45 participant within-subject evaluation of the impact of explicit Active Listening behaviour on participant attitudes toward AMOS itself and our targeted behaviour change goals. The results demonstrated that explicit Active Listening resulted in higher engagement and effectiveness in the potential for achieving health goals in comparison to an alternative focused on direct support compared to a chatbot lacking these attributes. Additionally, data on participants’ personality scores were collected to explore potential relationships between personality traits and intervention outcomes. Participant openness and conscientiousness appear to positively influence outcomes in the case of explicit Active Listening, but this effect tends to weaken—or even reverse—in the case of no explicit Active Listening.