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Influence of Directivity on the Perception of Embodied Conversational Agents' Speech


Jonathan Wendt, Benjamin Weyers, Jonas Stienen, Andrea Bönsch, Michael Vorländer, Torsten Wolfgang Kuhlen
19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 2019
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Embodied conversational agents become more and more important in various virtual reality applications, e.g., as peers, trainers or therapists. Besides their appearance and behavior, appropriate speech is required for them to be perceived as human-like and realistic. Additionally to the used voice signal, also its auralization in the immersive virtual environment has to be believable. Therefore, we investigated the effect of adding directivity to the speech sound source. Directivity simulates the orientation dependent auralization with regard to the agent's head orientation. We performed a one-factorial user study with two levels (n=35) to investigate the effect directivity has on the perceived social presence and realism of the agent's voice. Our results do not indicate any significant effects regarding directivity on both variables covered. We account this partly to an overall too low realism of the virtual agent, a not overly social utilized scenario and generally high variance of the examined measures. These results are critically discussed and potential further research questions and study designs are identified.

» Show BibTeX

@inproceedings{Wendt2019,
author = {Wendt, Jonathan and Weyers, Benjamin and Stienen, Jonas and B\"{o}nsch, Andrea and Vorl\"{a}nder, Michael and Kuhlen, Torsten W.},
title = {Influence of Directivity on the Perception of Embodied Conversational Agents' Speech},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents},
series = {IVA '19},
year = {2019},
isbn = {978-1-4503-6672-4},
location = {Paris, France},
pages = {130--132},
numpages = {3},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3308532.3329434},
doi = {10.1145/3308532.3329434},
acmid = {3329434},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {directional 3d sound, social presence, virtual acoustics, virtual agents},
}




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