Experimental Survey on Bridging the Digital Divide Through Daily Text Chat Communication with Virtual Agents.

To bridge the digital divide, this study investigates the current state of smartphone use and work to improve smartphone skills by using both online support and on-site support approaches in collaboration with industry, academia, and government. The proposed method aims to improve the frequency of smartphone use and smartphone skills through daily interaction with a virtual agent “Goodchan” using the SNS (LINE) text chat function as online support, as well as to eliminate concerns about smartphone use and improve motivation by conducting on-site smartphone consultation as on-site support. In this effort for dialogue chat, we use the Wizard of Oz method, in which the operator acts as Goodchan, and conducts dialogue chats with the participants. In addition, we proposed a smartphone skill evaluation sheet called SmaSki 2022 to quantitatively evaluate smartphone skills and surveyed changes in the smartphone skills of the participants. As a result, we confirmed that approximately 30% of the 46 elderly participants improved their smartphone skills during the six-month demonstration experiment at Shijōnawate-city in Japan.