Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can profoundly affect reciprocal social communication, resulting in substantial and challenging impairments. One aspect is that for people with ASD conversations in everyday life are challenging due to difficulties in understanding social cues, interpreting emotions, and maintaining social verbal exchanges. To address these challenges and enhance social skills, we propose the development of a learning game centered around social interaction and conversation, featuring Artificial Intelligence agents. Our initial step involves seven expert interviews to gain insight into the requirements for empathetic and conversational agents in the field of improving social skills for people with ASD in a gamified environment. We have identified two distinct use cases: (1) Conversation partners to discuss real-life issues and (2) Training partners to experience various scenarios to improve social skills. In the latter case, users will receive quests for interacting with the agent. Additionally, the agent can assign quests to the user, prompting specific conversations in real life and providing rewards for successful completion of quests.

翻译：自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）可能严重影响双向社会沟通能力，导致显著且具有挑战性的功能损伤。其中一个表现是，ASD患者在日常生活中进行对话面临挑战，这源于他们在理解社交线索、解读情绪以及维持社交性言语交流方面存在困难。为应对这些挑战并提升社交技能，我们提出开发一款以社交互动和对话为核心、搭载人工智能智能体的学习游戏。我们的初步工作包括开展七次专家访谈，旨在深入了解在游戏化环境中，面向ASD患者社交技能提升领域，共情对话智能体的设计要求。我们识别出两种不同的应用场景：（1）作为讨论现实生活问题的对话伙伴；（2）作为体验多样化场景以提升社交技能的培训伙伴。在后一种场景中，用户将收到与智能体互动的任务。此外，智能体可为用户分配任务，促使其在现实生活中发起特定对话，并在成功完成任务后提供奖励。