Social Cues in Animated Conversational Agents

SUMMARY In human-computer interaction people often interpret the interaction with the computer as interactions with humans. The social agency theory suggests that social cues like the face and voice of the agent motivate this interpretation. In two off-line experiments in which comprehension scores and liking ratings were collected, we found that participants preferred natural agents with natural voices, as predicted by the social-cue hypothesis. Although female agents with male voices formed an exception, this was explained by a stereotype effect. These findings support the social-cue hypothesis and the social agency theory that human characteristics are applied in the perception of computational animated conversational agents. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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