Computerized Personality Problems

Are you ready for the population explosion of "virtual" people who are about to inhabit our computers and televisions, toys and other computerized products?

Thirty-five Stanford University students in a course taught by communication professor Clifford Nass have found out we may not be as ready as we think we are. With the help of the National Science Foundation, the students tested how 1000 real people responded to virtual ones, especially to their voices.

Based on the assumption that virtual characters must have voices that are appealing to real people in order to survive in a free market, the students began the design of their experiments by reviewing research on psychology and how the brain processes speech.

Some of the student research teams investigated people's reactions to representations of human faces on computer screens, and one team looked at responses to a computer that "touches" its user through a joystick. The majority of the 11 teams chose to test virtual voices, including a hot new technology known as voice user interface (VUI). VUIs range from poor-quality machine-generated voices, which many companies use on their telephone answering equipment, to high-quality recordings of human voices, which are more expensive to produce but which are beginning to crop up on commercial Web sites. These voices can be employed to respond to consumer questions about investing in the stock market or how to set up the computer they just bought.

When subjects saw synthetic faces on computer screens coupled with a human-sounding voice, they gave less personal information about themselves than when they just heard the voice. They revealed the most information, however, to computer programs that simply presented questions in text. The experiment suggests that the more humanlike the interface, the greater desire humans have to manage their own lives, instead of having a computer do it for them.