COULD you learn to love your computer and feel more secure around it if it spoke to you in your own voice?
Many attempts to make computers more personable have failed – like the famously irritating animated paperclip, otherwise known as Microsoft’s “office assistant”. But perhaps we would enjoy interacting with our computers more if they mimicked our speech patterns.
At least that’s what Noriko Suzuki’s team at the ATR Media Information Science Laboratories in Kyoto thought. They got the idea from research on how social bonds develop between people. For instance, we develop a rapport with a child when it mimics us; we even do it with a parrot that is merely,…
