Cliff Nass, Professor of Communication, "Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship"
ABSTRACT:
Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. I will present a series of experiments, including new unpublished studies, which demonstrate that people are "voice-activated": people respond to voice technologies as they respond to actual people and behave as they would in any social situation. Among the questions I will address are: Can the emotion of a car's voice improve driving performance? Will people automatically attempt to imitate a computer's language? If a person's voice and body are separate, where will the listener think the person “is”? When should a computer-based voice say “I”? Should people be able to choose a voice interface's voice? For each question, I will discuss the basic theory, the experiment(s) and its results, and implications for design.
Clifford Nass (Ph.D., Sociology, Princeton University) is the Thomas M. Storke Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He has courtesy appointments in computer science; science, technology, and society; sociology; and symbolic systems. He is director of the CHIMe (Communication between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab and the co-Director of the Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory. He is the co-author of two books, The Media Equation and Wired for Speech, and over 100 papers concerning human-technology interaction. He has consulted on the design of over 200 information products and services for companies including Microsoft, Toyota, Nissan, Philips, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Charles Schwab.