Juniper Publishers- Journal of Robotics Abstract What kinds of social relationships can people have with computers are there activities that computers can engage in that actively draw people into relationships with them. What are the potential benefits to the people who participate in these human-computer relationships? To address these questions researchers introduces a theory of Relational Agents, which are computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. These can be purely software humanoid animated agents--as developed in this work but they can also be non-humanoid or embodied in various physical forms, from robots, to pets, to jewelry, clothing, hand-held’s, and other interactive devices. Central to the notion of relationship is that it is a persistent construct, spanning multiple interactions; thus, Relational Agents are explicitly designed to remember past history and manage future expectatio
