Here’s more proof that the human brain is hardwired for selfishness. This New Scientist article describes the efforts of a research team in Japan that has discovered that people react most favorably to a computer voice that mimics about 80 percent of the intonation, rhythm, and stresses of their own voices. The 20 percent dissimilarity is necessary to give the computer agent the illusion of having free will.
This has interesting implications for the development of social computer interfaces. Voice recognition is already quite good on a fast enough computer, but current text-to-speech technology, while more understandable than past attempts, is still grating to listen to. A system based on the user’s own voice would certainly smooth the human-machine interface.
It wouldn’t exactly be weird to talk to myself (I do it often enough now), but it would be a bit weird to have a machine answer me in my own voice.
via Boing Boing
