Using a human face in an interface

Abstract

We investigated subjects' responses to a synthesized talking face displayed on a computer screen in the context of a questionnaire study. Compared to subjects who answered questions presented via text display on a screen, subjects who answered the same questions spoken by a talking face spent more time, made fewer mistakes, and wrote more comments, When we compared responses to two different talking faces, subjects who answered questions spoken by a stem face, compared to subjects who answered questions spoken by a neutral face, spent more time, made fewer mistakes, and wrote more comments. They also liked the experience and the face less. We interpret this study in the light of desires to anthropomorphize computer interface and suggest that incautiously adding human characteristics, like face, voice, and facial expressions, could make the experience for users worse rather than better.CurrentMultimedn interfaces are created primarily by intuition. Development of amethod for analysis and design of Multimedia presentation interfaces is described. The study investigates task based information analysis, persistence of information, selective attention and concurrency in presentation. The method gives an agenda of issues, diagrams and techniques for specifications, and guidelines for media selection and presentation scripting. Use of the method is illustrated with an example from a shipboard emergency managements ystem. 205

WebPersona: a lifelike presentation agent for the World-Wide Web

“…Since earlier studies already provided evidence that a life-like characters has a strong a ective impact on the user (e.g., see 22,24,14]), we expected that this e ect also occurs in our case.…”

Communicating emotions in expressive avatars

“…Walker, Sproull and Subramani (1994) compared the responses of the subjects who participated in a computer-based interview survey where the questions were either presented in a text format or spoken by a talking face. Experimental results showed that the participants interacted with the talking face during the survey spent more time, made fewer mistakes and wrote more comments compared to the participants who answered the text-based questions.…”

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

“…One reason for these results can be that more human-like interfaces face different challenges than tool-like interfaces. Some examples of these challenges are: consistency between the characters verbal and visual cues are important for the users' positive experience of a system (Isbister and Nass [12]), the facial expression influenced the users' experience and interaction with the computer system (Walker et al [25]), and the presence of an animated character can make some users more anxious when using the computer system Rickenberg and Reeves [20]. All these results are interesting, but they do not give an answer to when a computer interface is experienced as more human-like or tool-like.…”