TY - GEN
T1 - Alexa as Coach
T2 - 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2020
AU - Wang, Jinping
AU - Yang, Hyun
AU - Shao, Ruosi
AU - Abdullah, Saeed
AU - Sundar, S. Shyam
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/4/21
Y1 - 2020/4/21
N2 - Public speaking anxiety is one of the most common social phobias. We explore the feasibility of using a conversational agent to reduce this anxiety. We developed a public-speaking tutor on the Amazon Alexa platform that enables users to engage in cognitive reconstruction exercises. We also investigated how the sociability of the agent might affect its performance as a tutor. A user study of 53 college students with fear of public speaking showed that the interaction with the agent served to assuage pre-speech state anxiety. Agent sociability improved the sense of interpersonal closeness, which was associated with lower pre-speech anxiety. Moreover, sociability of the agent increased participants' satisfaction and their willingness to continue engagement. Our findings, thus, have implications not only for addressing public speaking anxiety in a scalable way but also for the design of future conversational agents using smart speaker platforms.
AB - Public speaking anxiety is one of the most common social phobias. We explore the feasibility of using a conversational agent to reduce this anxiety. We developed a public-speaking tutor on the Amazon Alexa platform that enables users to engage in cognitive reconstruction exercises. We also investigated how the sociability of the agent might affect its performance as a tutor. A user study of 53 college students with fear of public speaking showed that the interaction with the agent served to assuage pre-speech state anxiety. Agent sociability improved the sense of interpersonal closeness, which was associated with lower pre-speech anxiety. Moreover, sociability of the agent increased participants' satisfaction and their willingness to continue engagement. Our findings, thus, have implications not only for addressing public speaking anxiety in a scalable way but also for the design of future conversational agents using smart speaker platforms.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089129534&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85089129534&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3313831.3376561
DO - 10.1145/3313831.3376561
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85089129534
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 25 April 2020 through 30 April 2020
ER -