Virtual Audience Providing AI-Generated Emotional Reactions to Enhance Self-Disclosure in Self-Introduction

The ambiguity of online text communication coming from the lack of audiences’ social cues often causes misunderstanding, which arouses a negative image of the message sender. Likewise, message senders feel social anxiety about whether their intentions are properly conveyed, or whether their messages may not sound offensive or impolite in communicating with text such as writing a self-introduction letter. In this paper, we design and develop a messaging assistant (Emoware) prototype which visualizes the audience’s predicted emotions to motivate the message sender to reveal more information. We conducted a user study comparing Emoware to plain text interface with 56 participants and found that Emoware positively affects writing by improving users’ self-disclosure intention, social support, and self-disclosure. This study contributes to overcoming the limitations of text modality in online communication.