Offscreen and in the chair next to your: Conversational agents speaking through actual human bodies

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how to interact with a conversational agent that speaks through an actual human body face-to-face and in person (i.e., offscreen). This is made possible by the cyranoid method: a technique involving a human person speech shadowing for a remote third-party (i.e., receiving their words via a covert audio-relay apparatus and repeating them aloud in real-time). When a person shadows for an artificial conversational agent source, we call the resulting hybrid an “echoborg.” We report a study in which people encountered conversational agents either through a human shadower face-to-face or via a text interface under conditions where they assumed their interlocutor to be an actual person. Our results show that the perception of a conversational agent is dramatically altered when the agent is voiced by an actual, tangible person. We discuss the potential implications this methodology has for the development of conversational agents and general person perception research.