The research on ambient assistive technology is concerned with features
humanoid agents should show in order to gain user acceptance. However,
differently aged groups may have different requirements. This paper
is particularly focused on agent’s voice preferences among elders,
young adults, and adolescents.
To this aim 316 users
organized in groups of 45/46 subjects of which 3 groups of elders (65+
years old), 2 of young adults (aged between 22–35 years), and
2 of adolescents (aged between 14–16 years) were recruited and
administered the Virtual Agent Acceptance Questionnaire (VAAQ), after
watching video-clips of mute and speaking agents, in order to test
their preferences in terms of willingness to interact, pragmatic and
hedonic qualities, and attractiveness, of proposed speaking and mute
agents. In addition, the elders were also tested on listening only
the agent’s. The results suggest that voice is primary for getting
elder’s acceptance of virtual humanoid agents in contrast to
young adults and adolescents which accept equally well either mute
or speaking agents.
Cite as: Esposito, A., Amorese, T., Cuciniello, M., Riviello, M.T., Esposito, A.M., Troncone, A., Cordasco, G. (2019) The Dependability of Voice on Elders’ Acceptance of Humanoid Agents. Proc. Interspeech 2019, 31-35, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1734
@inproceedings{esposito19_interspeech,
author={Anna Esposito and Terry Amorese and Marialucia Cuciniello and Maria Teresa Riviello and Antonietta M. Esposito and Alda Troncone and Gennaro Cordasco},
title={{The Dependability of Voice on Elders’ Acceptance of Humanoid Agents}},
year=2019,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2019},
pages={31--35},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1734}
}