CHI '94 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Designing multimedia environments for children: computers, creativity, and kids
Designing multimedia environments for children: computers, creativity, and kids
The design of children's technology
The design of children's technology
The effects of animated characters on anxiety, task performance, and evaluations of user interfaces
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Does computer-generated speech manifest personality? an experimental test of similarity-attraction
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The impact of animated interface agents: a review of empirical research
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Designing and evaluating conversational interfaces with animated characters
Embodied conversational agents
Truth is beauty: researching embodied conversational agents
Embodied conversational agents
Story spaces: interfaces for children's voices
CHI '00 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Effectiveness and usability of an online help agent embodied as a talking head
ICMI '08 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
Enhancements to Online Help: Adaptivity and Embodied Conversational Agents
UAHCI '09 Proceedings of the 5th International on ConferenceUniversal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Part II: Intelligent and Ubiquitous Interaction Environments
Comparison of child-human and child-computer interactions based on manual annotations
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
Gender affordances of conversational agents
Interacting with Computers
The impact of interface affordances on human ideation, problem solving, and inferential reasoning
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
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Conversational interfaces that incorporate animated characters potentially are well suited for educational software, since they can engage children as active learners and support question asking skills. In the present research, a simulation study was conducted in which twenty-four 7-to-10-year-old children used speech and pen input to converse directly with animated fish as they learned about marine biology. The animated fish responded with TTS voices crafted to sound either extroverted or introverted in accordance with the speech signal literature. During these interactions, children became highly engaged, asking an average of 152 questions during a 45-minute session. Self-report measures further confirmed that children liked "talking to the animals and that the TTS and interface were easy to understand and use. The auditory embodiment of animated characters as TTS output also had a significant selective impact on children's engagement, in asking science questions. Specifically, children asked +16% more science questions when conversing with animated characters embodying an extrovert TTS voice that resembled the speech of a master teacher (e.g., higher volume and pitch, wider pitch range), rather than an introvert TTS voice, although no differential impact was found on social questions. These findings reveal that conversational interfaces can be designed that effectively stimulate children during learning activities, thereby supporting the goals of next-generation educational software.