“We had a robot instruct teams of students in a creativity task. The robot either used a confident, passionate tone of voice or a normal, matter-of-fact tone of voice,” said Kerstin Fischer of the University of Southern Denmark.
Around the same time, academics from University of California, Davis published results of experiments that showed people producing “louder and slower speech with less pitch variation” when addressing AI systems such as Alexa and Siri compared to how they spoke to other people. They found that not only do people adjust how they speak when dealing with devices, they are less likely to accurately understand in turn if the device sounds less than human.
There could be a downside, however, going by another recent piece of research – from the University of Gothenburg’s Jonas Ivarsson and Oskar Lindwall – which suggested that “as AI becomes increasingly realistic, our trust in those with whom we communicate may be compromised”.