Framing, more than speech, affects how machine agents are perceived

Alina S. Larson and Jean E. Fox Tree

Behaviour and Information Technology, 2024, vol. 43, issue 14, 3461-3480

Abstract: We tested how speech phenomena (discourse markers like oh and you know and fillers like uh and um) and the conceptualisation of voices (as human or machine) affected speaker quality ratings (trustworthiness, friendliness, intelligence, and nervousness) across dialogues and monologues. Listeners preferred human voices over synthesised voices in dialogue containing discourse markers and fillers (Study 1). Shifting the location of discourse markers to new locations did not negatively impact ratings of what participants heard (Study 2), but hearing shifted markers did lead participants to rate imagined machine speech containing markers more negatively on a post-experiment questionnaire. Backstories also impacted perceptions of recorded speech: People rated the same synthesised speech more positively if they believed it was created by a person than if they believed it was created by machine (Study 3). Similarly, people's opinions about robots varied depending on context (Study 4). How people rate machine agents in the future will likely reflect how machine agents are portrayed to the public, capabilities aside.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0144929X.2023.2278086 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tbitxx:v:43:y:2024:i:14:p:3461-3480

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tbit20

DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2023.2278086

Access Statistics for this article

Behaviour and Information Technology is currently edited by Dr Panos P Markopoulos

More articles in Behaviour and Information Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().