Exploring the Interplay Between Voice, Personality, and Gender in Human-Agent Interactions

To foster effective human-agent interactions, designers need to identify characteristics that could affect how agents are perceived and accepted, and to what extent they could impact rapport-building. Aiming to explore the role of user-agent synchrony, we assessed 388 participants to determine whether they could perceive personality traits from four artificial voices we selected and adapted from human samples, considering gender (male or female) and personality (introvert or extrovert) as grouping factors. Our findings suggest that participants were able to significantly differentiate female agents by personality, while male agents were not consistently distinguished. We also observed evidence of personality synchrony, where participants tended to perceive the first agent as more similar to their own personality, with this effect driven mainly by male participants, especially toward male agents. This paper contributes findings and insights to consider the interplay of user-agent personality and gender synchrony in the design of human-agent interactions.