アナウンサエージェントの対話的ニュース読み上げ手法による寄り添い感・信頼感の向上と理解導入効果

抄録

In this paper, we investigate an interactive read-aloud method for a news caster agent that gives the impression of familiarity, trust, consideration and kindness for users without the need for private conversations. In recent years, CG avatars and virtual agents get more popular, and interactive information services using anthropomorphic media have been developed. Virtual agents have the advantage of increasing intimacy with users through their anthropomorphic appearance and voice communication. On the other hand, agents providing public news information cannot take advantage of the characteristics of virtual agents because the provider avoids excessive personalities of the agent and private communication between users and the agent in order to give users an impartial and neutral impression. In this paper, we propose a method to reading-aloud-news by virtual agents, which makes users feel familiarity, trust, consideration, kindness, and close to them without private communication. We designed the interactive reading-aloud-news method for the personal newscaster agent; the agent repeats the same sentence with easy words or slow and loud voice (or with both manners) corresponding to the user’s difficulties in understanding or/and hearing of the sentence. We evaluated our proposed interactive reading-aloud-news method from the viewpoints of the following three; 1) how the user interprets the reading manners into the agent’s intention, 2) how the reading manners affect the impression of agent and 3) how the reading manners affect the im pression of news. The result of evaluation shows that the reading method makes the user feel as though the agent tried to understand the user’s state and elevates the famil iar, intelligent, and reliable impressions for the agent. In addition, the user’s listenable and understandable impressions of the news were also elevated. The effectiveness of the proposed method in interactive news reading by virtual agents was confirmed.