  Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language
Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic,
yet such research has just started on dialogue systems. In this paper, we
introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of
people under self-quarantine. We conduct a control simulation experiment to
assess the effects of the user interface, a web-based virtual agent called Nora
vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the
android offers a more valuable user experience by giving the impression of
being more empathetic and engaging in the conversation due to its nonverbal
information, such as facial expressions and body gestures.

Computation and Language;Human-Computer Interaction