  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.
