Recorded speech, virtual environments, and the effectiveness of embodied conversational agents

Development of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) has tended to focus on the character’s dialog capabilities, with less research on the design and effect of the agent’s voice and of the virtual environments in which the agent exists. For a study of human-ECA rapport, we iteratively developed three versions of a game featuring an ECA, where each version of the game had a different combination of speech generation and virtual environment. Evaluations of the users’ interactions with the different versions of the game enabled us to assess the effects of changes in the agent’s voice and of changes in the agent’s virtual world.