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Similarity is more important than expertise: accent effects in speech interfaces

Published: 29 April 2007 Publication History

Abstract

In a balanced between-participants experiment (N = 96) American and Swedish participants listened to tourist information on a website about an American or Swedish city presented in English with either an American or Swedish accent and evaluated the speakers' knowledge of the topic, the voice characteristics, and the information characteristics. Users preferred accents similar to their own. Similarity-attraction effects were so powerful that same-accents speakers were viewed as being more knowledgeable than different-accent speakers even when the information would be much better-known by the opposite-accent speaker. Implications for similarity-attraction overwhelming expertise are discussed.

References

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Dahlbäck, N., Swaamy, S., Nass, C., Arvidsson, F., and Skågeby, J. Spoken Interaction with Computers in a Native or Non-native Language -- Same or Different?, Proceedings of INTERACT 2001, 294--301 (2001).
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Byrne, D & Griffitt, W. and Stefanik, D. Attraction and similarity of personality characteristics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5, 82--90 (1967).
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Nass, C., and Brave, S. Wired for Speech. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (2005).
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Nass, C. and Lee, K.M. Does computer generated speech manifest personality? An experimental test of similarity-attraction. Proceedings of CHI 2000, ACM Press, 229--336, (2000).
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Reeves, B. and Nass, C. The Media Equation. New York: Cambridge University Press, (1996).
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Ryan, E. B. Social psychological mechanisms underlying native speaker evaluation of non-native speaker. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 5 (2), 148--159 (1983).
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Ryan, E.B., Giles, H., and Sebastian, R.J. An integrative perspective for the study of attitudes toward language variation. In Ryan, E.B. and Giles, H. (Eds.) Attitudes Toward Language: Social and Applied Contexts, Arnold, London (1982).

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2007
1654 pages
ISBN:9781595935939
DOI:10.1145/1240624
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 29 April 2007

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Author Tags

  1. cross-cultural communication
  2. speech based systems
  3. trust and liking

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CHI07
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CHI07: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 28 - May 3, 2007
California, San Jose, USA

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CHI '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 182 of 840 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)The Impact of Perceived Tone, Age, and Gender on Voice Assistant Persuasiveness in the Context of Product RecommendationsProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665545(1-15)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)My Voice as a Daily Reminder: Self-Voice Alarm for Daily Goal AchievementProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641932(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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  • (2023)Introduction to this special issue: guiding the conversation: new theory and design perspectives for conversational user interfacesHuman–Computer Interaction10.1080/07370024.2022.216190538:3-4(159-167)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2023
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  • (2022)“I Want It That Way”: Exploring Users’ Customization and Personalization Preferences for Home AssistantsExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519843(1-8)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2022)A Systematic Review of Voice Assistant Usability: An ISO 9241–11 ApproachSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-022-01172-33:4Online publication date: 3-May-2022
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