Relating to speech evoked car personalities.

Could an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system with a speech evoked personality change your relationship with your car? Alter your behavior? Would you like it more? Would it be easier or harder to use? Would a snarky or encouraging speech style make a difference? We report the findings of a preliminary 30 participant study using an experiential prototype that used three different speech styles designed to evoke different personalities: Neutral, Encouraging and Snarky. Our results indicate that driving preferences are conservative in practice and were not strongly influenced by a brief exposure to our system; however reactions to the system were more nuanced than expected. We report on some significant results for initial evaluations of desired attributes for embedded agents (p<0.01) and for the ease of use (p<0.016), usefulness (p<0.05) and friendliness (p<0.05) of the prototype system. Additionally, we found a significant upgrade in gas choice (p<0.01) based on the agent making a recommendation.