Our paper “Does Listening Matter? Backchanneling and Nodding in AI Clone” (Koji Inoue, Kazushi Kato, Tatsuya Kawahara, Shunichi Kasahara) will be presented at ICMI 2026, the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, in Naples, Italy (October 5–9, 2026).
AI clones usually reproduce what a person says and how they sound, but not how they listen. We added verbal backchannels and head nodding, driven by real-time prediction models, to an AI clone with a cloned voice and LLM-based responses. In a study with 35 participants, these listening behaviors made the clone seem more attentive, strengthened the sense of talking with the real person, and increased the feeling of co-presence.