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.
Preview
CE_human.pdf
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike.
Download (1MB) | Preview
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 |
Repository Staff Only (login required)
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year