Internship Assignment Form University Twente
Project description
Conversational agents, such as Apple’s Siri, are digital technologies that can interact with humans via voice and text. This tech has been increasingly acknowledged to contribute to mental health and well-being, for instance as coach to deliver engaging interventions and collect patient data. However, in our project we design virtual humans, also called embodied conversation agents (ECAs), embedded in immersive virtual reality (IVR) contexts aiming to simulate social pressure for addiction treatments in vulnerable groups (e.g. normative influences, social facilitation). However, to increase the persuasive power the agent, we have recorded voices from different speakers portraying different personality characteristics (i.e. agreeable or hostile). In this research, you will investigate how these voices, embedded in our ECA, are perceived by users. Think about the perceived persuasiveness of both styles and what qualities users are attributing to certain voices. How pleasant does this voice sound? You will design an (online) perception study in which participants are asked to evaluate the different voices, spoken by the ECA, on several dimensions. Through an initial literature research, you will find out what kind of dimensions are suitable in this context. A follow-up question is what parameters in the voice contribute to the perception of certain dimensions. For instance, what acoustic parameters are predictive on how hostile this voice is perceived? Finally, it would also be interesting to investigate what role the personality of the perceiver plays in how the voice is perceived. As you can see, there are quite some directions for this research, depending on the interests and skills of the student.
Tasks
The student will:
- Look in literature for relevant voice-related perceptual variables (e.g. persuasiveness)
- Design and carry out a perception study
- Extract acoustic parameters (depending on interests and skills of the student)
- Carry out an inferential statistical analysis to answer the research question
Profile
We are looking for a student who:
- Is enthusiastic and interested in voice research for persuasive ECAs
- Is interested in carrying out statistical analyses
Supervisors
Simon Langener, MSc. (s.langener@utwente.nl)
Dr. Khiet Truong (k.p.truong@utwente.nl)
