title: Virtual patients: assessment of synthesized versus recorded speech.
abstract: Virtual patients have great potential for training patient-doctor communication skills. There are two approaches to producing the virtual human speech: synthesized speech or recorded speech. The tradeoffs in flexibility, fidelity, and cost raise an interesting development decision: which speech approach is most appropriate for virtual patients? Two groups of medical students participated in a user study interviewing a virtual patient under each condition. We found no significant differences in the overall impression, speech intelligibility, and task performance. Our conclusion is that if the goal is to train students of which questions to ask, synthesized speech is just as effective as recorded speech. However, if the goal is to teach the student how to ask the correct questions, a high level of expressiveness in the virtual patient is needed. This in turn necessitates the higher cost - even with the lower flexibility - of recorded speech.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Information Science Engineering, University of Florida, USA.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Dickerson
authors.forename: Kyle
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Johnsen
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Raij
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lok
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Stevens
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bernard
authors.forename: D Scott
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Lind
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004501:Education, Medical; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D013637:Tape Recording; D014481:United States; D014584:User-Computer Interface