Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, The

Social-Psychological Research

Among the most fascinating of the many experiments that have been conducted on the subject are the ones done by Stanford University professors Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves and documented in their book, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. The following is a distillation of some of their findings.

The professors ran a series of studies to determine if the “rules” of social psychology (that had been tested thousands of times over the past century or so) would hold true not only for person-to-person interactions, but also for person-to-media interactions. They took some tried-and-true social psychological interactions (based on famous experiments dealing ...