The interaction between voice and appearance in the embodiment of a robot tutor

Robot embodiment is, by its very nature, holistic and understanding how various aspects contribute to the user perception of the robot is non-trivial. A study is presented here that investigates whether there is an interaction effect between voice and other aspects of embodiment, such as movement and appearance, in a pedagogical setting. An on-line study was distributed to children aged 11–17 that uses a modified Godspeed questionnaire. We show an interaction effect between the robot embodiment and voice in terms of perceived lifelikeness of the robot. Politeness is a key strategy used in learning and teaching, and here an effect is also observed for perceived politeness. Interestingly, participants’ overall preference was for embodiment combinations that are deemed polite and more like a teacher, but are not necessarily the most lifelike. From these findings, we are able to inform the design of robotic tutors going forward

An Investigation Of The Effects Of Speakers\u27 Vocal Characteristics On Ratings Of Confidence And Persuasion

This experiment furthered previous research on perceptions of speakers as a function of various vocal characteristics. A low relevance passage was recorded by male and female speakers, simulating voices of orotund, thin, thoaty, flat, breathy, as well as rate and pitch variations, so as to determine effects on persuasiveness and confidence. Main effects were found regarding gender across all vocal characteristics. While an orotund voice produced predominately positive effects of ratings of speakers\u27 confidence and persuasiveness, a breathy effect elicited negative ratings. The male speaker was judged more harshly than the female speaker when the vocal characterization departed from the norm

The Audio Implicit Association Test: Human Preferences and Implicit Associations Concerning Machine Voices

Auditory human-machine interfaces are becoming ubiquitous. Interactive voice response systems, navigation systems, socially assistive robots, and smart houses are just a few examples of technologies that support auditory interactions. This study uses the implicit association test (IAT) to measure participants’ associative strength between human and machine voices and pleasant or unpleasant attributes. To accomplish this, the IAT needed to be validated using audio stimuli and the associative strength of secondary features of stimuli, that is, features other than their semantic content. Six IAT experiments were conducted to test the ability of the IAT to measure association strengths of the target concepts of audio stimuli and an attribute dimension in addition to target concepts of secondary features and an attribute dimension. Results support the effectiveness of an audio IAT, an IAT for secondary features, and an IAT that combines audio with secondary features. Results also show that participants had a stronger association between human voices and pleasant attributes than machine voices and pleasant attributes

A sociophonetic analysis of female-sounding virtual assistants

As conversational machines (e.g., Apple\u27s Siri and Amazon\u27s Alexa) are increasingly anthropomorphized by humans and viewed as active interlocutors, it raises questions about the social information indexed by machine voices. This thesis provides a preliminary exploration of the relationship between human sociophonetics, social expectations, and conversational machine voices. An in-depth literature review (a) explores human relationships with and expectations for real and movie robots, (b) discusses the rise of conversational machines, (c) assesses the history of how female human voices have been perceived, and (d) details social-indexical properties associated with F0, vowel formants (F1 and F2), -ING pronunciation, and /s/ center of gravity in human speech. With background context in place, Siri and Alexa\u27s voices were recorded reciting various sentences and passages and analyzed for each of the aforementioned vocal features. Results suggest that sociolinguistic data from studies on human voices could inform hypotheses about how users might characterize conversational machine voices and encourage further consideration of how human and machine sociophonetics might influence each other

The Relationship between Attention and Rapport in Conversation with AAC Users

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices enable people who cannot speak to communicate with others. Unfortunately, they are tedious to use and are believed to lower the satisfaction of interacting with others. This thesis attempted to document the impact that AAC devices have on social interactions, in the hope of developing ways to improve the AAC user experience through innovative engineering and/or user training. Twenty-five female-female pairs of participants were video recorded having two five-minute conversations. One was asked to communicate through an AAC device. Partners of AAC users reported less rapport the more time they spent looking around the room suggesting that the gaze behavior of individuals was critical to the interaction experience. Participants also spent less time looking at the AAC users face during the second interaction in which the AAC input device was an Xbox controller, which simulated the tedious and challenging interfaces that are commonly used. Not surprisingly, all participants reported much less rapport during this second, more communicatively challenging interaction. This pattern of results suggested that, as the AAC interface requires more time to compose each statement the attention of conversational partner will decline, which will lead to less rapport and less satisfying social interactions. Key Words: AAC, attention, conversation, gaze, rappor

The persuasiveness of humanlike computer interfaces varies more through narrative characterization than through the uncanny valley

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Just as physical appearance affects persuasion and compliance in human communication, it may also bias the processing of information from avatars, computer-animated characters, and other computer interfaces with faces. Although the most persuasive of these interfaces are often the most humanlike, they incur the greatest risk of falling into the uncanny valley, the loss of empathy associated with eerily human characters. The uncanny valley could delay the acceptance of humanlike interfaces in everyday roles. To determine the extent to which the uncanny valley affects persuasion, two experiments were conducted online with undergraduates from Indiana University. The first experiment (N = 426) presented an ethical dilemma followed by the advice of an authority figure. The authority was manipulated in three ways: depiction (recorded or animated), motion quality (smooth or jerky), and recommendation (disclose or refrain from disclosing sensitive information). Of these, only the recommendation changed opinion about the dilemma, even though the animated depiction was eerier than the human depiction. These results indicate that compliance with an authority persists even when using a realistic computer-animated double. The second experiment (N = 311) assigned one of two different dilemmas in professional ethics involving the fate of a humanlike character. In addition to the dilemma, there were three manipulations of the character’s human realism: depiction (animated human or humanoid robot), voice (recorded or synthesized), and motion quality (smooth or jerky). In one dilemma, decreasing depiction realism or increasing voice realism increased eeriness. In the other dilemma, increasing depiction realism decreased perceived competence. However, in both dilemmas realism had no significant effect on whether to punish the character. Instead, the willingness to punish was predicted in both dilemmas by narratively characterized trustworthiness. Together, the experiments demonstrate both direct and indirect effects of narratives on responses to humanlike interfaces. The effects of human realism are inconsistent across different interactions, and the effects of the uncanny valley may be suppressed through narrative characterization

How robots change our minds

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-174).This thesis explores the extent to which socially capable humanoid robots have the potential to influence human belief, perception and behavior. Sophisticated computational systems coupled with human-like form and function render such robots as potentially powerful forms of persuasive technology. Currently, there is very little understanding of the persuasive potential of such machines. As personal robots become a reality in our immediate environment, a better understanding of the mechanisms behind, and the capabilities of, their ability to influence, is becoming increasingly important. This thesis proposes some guiding principles by which to qualify persuasion. A study was designed in which the MDS (Mobile Dexterous Social) robotic platform was used to solicit visitors for donations at the Museum of Science in Boston. The study tests some nonverbal behavioral variables known to change persuasiveness in humans, and measures their effect in human-robot interaction. The results of this study indicate that factors such as robot-gender, subject-gender, touch, interpersonal distance, and the perceived autonomy of the robot, have a huge impact on the interaction between human and robot, and must be taken into consideration when designing sociable robots. This thesis applies the term persuasive robotics to define and test the theoretical and practical implications for robot-triggered changes in human attitude and behavior. Its results provide for a vast array of speculations with regard to what practical applications may become available using this framework.by Michael Steven Siegel.S.M