Judging Laura: Perceived Qualities of a Mediated Human Versus an Embodied Agent

Increasingly, embodied agents take over tasks which are traditionally performed by humans. But how do users perceive these embodied agents? In this paper, we describe an experiment in which we compared a real person and a virtual character giving route instructions. The voice, the outfit and the gestures were kept (close to) identical for both cases. The participants judged them, among other things, on trustworthiness, personality and presentation style. In contrast to the outcome of earlier investigations, in most categories the agent scored better or comparable to the human guide. This suggests that embodied agents are suitable to take the place of humans in information-giving applications, provided that natural sounding speech and natural looking nonverbal behaviors can be achieved.