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    Human or Robot?: Investigating voice, appearance and gesture motion realism of conversational social agents


    Ferstl, Ylva, Thomas, Sean, Guiard, Cédric, Ennis, Cathy and McDonnell, Rachel (2021) Human or Robot?: Investigating voice, appearance and gesture motion realism of conversational social agents. Proceedings of the 21th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. pp. 76-83.

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    Abstract

    Research on creation of virtual humans enables increasing automatization of their behavior, including synthesis of verbal and non-verbal behavior. As the achievable realism of different aspects of agent design evolves asynchronously, it is important to understand if and how divergence in realism between behavioral channels can elicit negative user responses. Specifically, in this work, we investigate the question of whether autonomous virtual agents relying on synthetic text-to-speech voices should portray a corresponding level of realism in the non-verbal channels of motion and visual appearance, or if, alternatively, the best available realism of each channel should be used. In two perceptual studies, we assess how realism of voice, motion, and appearance influence the perceived match of speech and gesture motion, as well as the agent’s likability and human-likeness. Our results suggest that maximizing realism of voice and motion is preferable even when this leads to realism mis-matches, but for visual appearance, lower realism may be preferable. (A video abstract can be found at https://youtu.be/arfZZ-hxD1Y.)
    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: gesture motion; text-to-speech; animation style; perception; conversational agents; agent design; human-computer interfaces; anthropomorphism;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science
    Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute
    Item ID: 20457
    Identification Number: 10.1145/3472306.3478338
    Depositing User: IR Editor
    Date Deposited: 12 Aug 2025 15:26
    Journal or Publication Title: Proceedings of the 21th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
    Publisher: ACM
    Refereed: Yes
    Related URLs:
    URI: https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/20457
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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