This paper reports an exploration of the concept of social intelligence in the context of designing home dialogue systems for an Ambient Intelligence home. It describes a Wizard of Oz experiment involving a robotic interface capable of simulating several human social behaviours. Our results show that endowing a home dialogue system with some social intelligence will: (a) create a positive bias in the user's perception of technology in the home environment, (b) enhance user acceptance for the home dialogue system, and (c) trigger social behaviours by the user in relation to the home dialogue system.

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness aimed to support groups of friends to jointly watch a soccer match at remote locations. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards their remote partners. The experiment has provided concrete quantitative and qualitative evidence for the hypothesized benefits of supporting primary relationships through awareness systems and of the relevance of social presence as a requirement in the design of peripheral awareness displays.