Invisible but Audible: Enhancing Information Awareness through Anthropomorphic Speech

Information awareness is the process by which people obtain knowledge about the status of personal information that is important to them. This is usually provided graphically. When the information would otherwise be hidden from view, it must be brought to the front automatically or manually making users stop what they are doing and interact with the system. This design strategy ignores the human costs of interrupting the user. A solution is to use speech output to make the delivery invisible, but the incorporation of speech invokes anthropomorphic feelings whose cues must be carefully controlled if the system is to be regarded as humanised. This paper describes an empirical study designed to investigate how the content contextually cues the significance of visually hidden information, and how the delivery, including attentive interruptions, linguistic variation and politeness, impacts on the social acceptability of a speaking system. The results indicated that heuristic-oriented people felt a degree of rapport with the speech-based system, and that it enabled them to appreciate the content of hidden information more strongly than those who were analytic in nature. Overall, the system was unexpectedly well accepted, leading to the abstraction of design guidelines for those speech-based systems that exploit invisibility to enhance information awareness.