Social-Psychological Origins of Feelings of Presence: Creating Social Presence With Machine-Generated Voices

We demonstrate, via 2 experiments (N = 72 and N = 80) done in e-commerce contexts, that social responses to technology influence feelings of social presence. Users feel stronger social presence when they hear a computer-synthesized voice that manifests a personality that (a) is similar to the user (especially to the extrovert user) as compared to dissimilar, (b) is consistent with the text's personality, and (c) is extroverted as compared to introverted. We discuss various applications of these findings to the design of human-computer interfaces, as well as to the study of presence.