Can we talk about bruno?: exploring virtual human counselors' spoken accents and their impact on users' conversations

Abstract

Counseling requires intimacy between a counselor and a patient to reach healing and growth. However, building rapport between virtual human counselors and computing college students is a complex problem. It requires understanding students' experiences and goals, as also the effects the characteristics of a virtual human counselor, like the spoken accent, have in the interaction with a patient in regards to messenger credibility and self-disclosure. This paper reports findings of how virtual human counselors' spoken accents impact computing undergraduate students' mental wellness conversations in regard to students' self-reported multilingual skills: monolingual or multilingual. We developed two English-speaking rapport-building virtual humans, each with a different spoken English accent-American or German, to interview 62 North American undergraduate computing students from a North American campus. Our findings suggest that virtual humans' spoken accents impacted students' perceptions of the virtual humans' speaking skills. Additionally, we found a similarity-attraction effect between monolingual English speakers and the American-English-accented virtual human counselor concerning participants' engagement and perceptions of the virtual human's speaking skills.