Talking Avatar and Gender

A talking avatar is an animated virtual character that conveys information by its facial expressions, head motion and voice. It is used in many domains including technical support and customer service, communication aids, speech therapy, film special effects, education and training. The talkative avatar is increasingly being employed in e-commerce sites, virtual shopping malls and video presentations.

Talking avatars have been shown to be effective in enhancing consumer perception of social presence, information credibility and website trust. These facilitating effects are consistent with the Computers as Social Actors theory [9] and the persona effect, which states that consumers reciprocally respond to multimedia messages by forming a social connection with the speaker. Furthermore, the non-interactive talking avatar design evokes an automatic human response in consumers, thereby triggering the social conversation schema and promoting a sense of proximateness. Moreover, the avatars are capable of providing product and brand information through textual dialogue generated by a text-to-speech engine.

Nevertheless, previous research on talking avatars has failed to explore the moderating effect of consumer gender on the impact of these technologies on consumer behaviour. This paper investigates whether the interaction between the non-interactive talking avatar and consumer gender influences perceptions of social presence, information credibility, website trust and patronage intention.

There are several free and paid software options available for creating a talking avatar. Examples include Speechify Video, Voki and SitePal. Adobe Character Animator is another option for more advanced animators. This software enables users to create 3D photo-face style avatars as well as 2D illustrative avatars and offers a variety of customization options, such as different hairstyles, accessories, facial animation and lip sync technology. talking avatar