The role of spoken feedback in experiencing multimodal interfaces as human-like

Abstract

If user interfaces should be made human-like vs. tool-like has been debated in the HCI field, and this debate affects the development of multimodal interfaces. However, little empirical study has been done to support either view so far. Even if there is evidence that humans interpret media as other humans, this does not mean that humans experience the interfaces as human-like. We studied how people experience a multimodal timetable system with varying degree of human-like spoken feedback in a Wizardof-Oz study. The results showed that users' views and preferences lean significantly towards anthropomorphism after actually experiencing the multimodal timetable system. The more humanlike the spoken feedback is the more participants preferred the system to be human-like. The results also showed that the users experience matched their preferences. This shows that in order to appreciate a human-like interface, the users have to experience it.

A Holistic Approach to Design and Evaluation of Mixed Reality Systems

“…In the first case study, a couple of the participants who responded negatively on the question regarding comparability between the MR system instructions and human instructions, motivated their response in that you can ask and get a response from a human, but this MR system did not have the ability to answer random questions from the users. Adding this type of dialogue management and/or intelligence in the system would very likely increase the usability and usefulness of the system, and also make it more human-like than tool-like [29]. In the second study we found that showing real time status of vehicles and resources is one important output improvement.…”