title: A truly human interface: interacting face-to-face with someone whose words are determined by a computer program.
abstract: We use speech shadowing to create situations wherein people converse in person with a human whose words are determined by a conversational agent computer program. Speech shadowing involves a person (the shadower) repeating vocal stimuli originating from a separate communication source in real-time. Humans shadowing for conversational agent sources (e.g., chat bots) become hybrid agents ("echoborgs") capable of face-to-face interlocution. We report three studies that investigated people's experiences interacting with echoborgs and the extent to which echoborgs pass as autonomous humans. First, participants in a Turing Test spoke with a chat bot via either a text interface or an echoborg. Human shadowing did not improve the chat bot's chance of passing but did increase interrogators' ratings of how human-like the chat bot seemed. In our second study, participants had to decide whether their interlocutor produced words generated by a chat bot or simply pretended to be one. Compared to those who engaged a text interface, participants who engaged an echoborg were more likely to perceive their interlocutor as pretending to be a chat bot. In our third study, participants were naïve to the fact that their interlocutor produced words generated by a chat bot. Unlike those who engaged a text interface, the vast majority of participants who engaged an echoborg did not sense a robotic interaction. These findings have implications for android science, the Turing Test paradigm, and human-computer interaction. The human body, as the delivery mechanism of communication, fundamentally alters the social psychological dynamics of interactions with machine intelligence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science , London, UK.
authors.forename: Kevin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Corti
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science , London, UK.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gillespie
keywords: Turing Test; android science; cyranoid; dialog systems; embodiment; human–computer interaction; speech shadowing; uncanny valley