While NLP research has made strides in conversational tasks, many approaches focus on single-turn responses with well-defined objectives or evaluation criteria. In contrast, coaching presents unique challenges with initially undefined goals that evolve through multi-turn interactions, subjective evaluation criteria, mixed-initiative dialogue. In this work, we describe and implement five multi-turn coaching agents that exhibit distinct conversational styles, and evaluate them through a user study, collecting first-person feedback on 155 conversations. We find that users highly value core functionality, and that stylistic components in absence of core components are viewed negatively. By comparing user feedback with third-person evaluations from health experts and an LM, we reveal significant misalignment across evaluation approaches. Our findings provide insights into design and evaluation of conversational coaching agents and contribute toward improving human-centered NLP applications.

We present an end-to-end framework for generating synthetic users for evaluating interactive agents designed to encourage positive behavior changes, such as in health and lifestyle coaching. The synthetic users are grounded in health and lifestyle conditions, specifically sleep and diabetes management in this study, to ensure realistic interactions with the health coaching agent. Synthetic users are created in two stages: first, structured data are generated grounded in real-world health and lifestyle factors in addition to basic demographics and behavioral attributes; second, full profiles of the synthetic users are developed conditioned on the structured data. Interactions between synthetic users and the coaching agent are simulated using generative agent-based models such as Concordia, or directly by prompting a language model. Using two independently-developed agents for sleep and diabetes coaching as case studies, the validity of this framework is demonstrated by analyzing the coaching agent’s understanding of the synthetic users’ needs and challenges. Finally, through multiple blinded evaluations of user-coach interactions by human experts, we demonstrate that our synthetic users with health and behavioral attributes more accurately portray real human users with the same attributes, compared to generic synthetic users not grounded in such attributes. The proposed framework lays the foundation for efficient development of conversational agents through extensive, realistic, and grounded simulated interactions.