My name is Evelyne Kimani. I'm a PhD student at Northeastern university Khoury college of computer
sciences. I'll be presenting work that I did in collaboration with Dhaval Parmar Prasant Murali
and Timothy Bickmore titled sharing the load online virtual presentation with co-presenter
agents. I'll be co-presenting with angela our virtual presenter agent. Hi everyone I am Angela
COVID-19 pandemic has forced the majority of meetings online. The need to give polished
and impactful virtual presentations has become imperative across all fields including sciences.
However, there are several significant barriers to giving good virtual presentations including public
speaking anxiety and the difficulty of maintaining audience engagement. Public speaking anxiety
affects about 35 percent of the population and is the most prevalent form of anxiety disorder. In
online settings anxiety is still an issue and can be made worse by lower audience responsiveness.
Maintaining audience engagement in an online presentation is challenging particularly because
of the significant number of distractions that are available, such as surfing the web. There
is also a lack of accountability for attention that is often afforded in face-to-face settings.
Regarding public speaking anxiety, social impact theory predicts that
presenting with one or more persons should decrease public
speaking anxiety. This effect has been confirmed in prior empirical studies
Regarding the challenge of maintaining audience engagement,
online recommendations offered are to keep presentations more interactive and fast-paced
and to frequently provide pattern breaks, such as changing visuals or speakers. Therefore
involving a co-presenter like myself could also improve audience engagement
In this study, we explore the use of an automated co-presenter for virtual presentations.
Let's move on to the design of the co-presenter agent system.
Our virtual co-presenter, Angela, is a humanoid character that is
capable of displaying a variety of non-verbal behaviors that simulate face-to-face dialogue.
These include directional gazes for signaling turn-taking and other gestures such as pointing.
We designed the system so that angela and the human presenter would take turns each presenting
one or more slides, with angela's dialogue being pre-scripted for each slide. The agent,
Angela's, speech was synthesized in real-time using a commercial text-to-speech engine.
To examine the effectiveness of the agent, we conducted a two-session within-subjects study
where 12 participants delivered a pre-prepared PowerPoint presentation with a virtual
co-presenter agent in one presentation and by themselves in a second presentation. The
sessions were three to six days apart and both study sessions were conducted online via zoom.
In both sessions, participants were sent a scientific paper
from which the presentations were based one day prior to their online study sessions.
During the online study sessions, we first assess the participants' social demographics,
their speaker confidence, and public speaking anxiety. This was followed by a presentation
review session and then the presenters were asked to rehearse in one session with the agent and in
another session by themselves. After delivering or rather rehearsing for the presentation,
we asked them to deliver the presentation in front of a confederate audience and then report
on their presentation confidence, the quality of their presentation, and their experience in one
session presenting with the agent and in another session presenting by themselves. At the end of we
conducted an interview with them assessing the experience when giving presentations.
Analysis of the study revealed that presenters were satisfied with the agent,
found her to be helpful and trustworthy. There was also some evidence that the agent helped
participants feel less nervous about their talks compared to presentations without the agent. As
shown in the bar chart here we found that the agent had a significant effect on presenters'
ratings of their presentation among those who found who are satisfied with angela.
In the interview sessions, participants reported that the agent reduced their workload by giving
part of the presentation for them. The agent also increased their confidence because they felt that
they were part of a team with the agent. They also felt that the agent decreased their nervousness
by giving them a mental break to prepare for the next part of their presentation.
Our other findings are discussed in the paper. As future work, we plan to integrate the agent
into a video conferencing system where we could overlay the agent and have her
visually interact with the slideway. We're also interested in exploring different roles that the
agent could take in online presentations. And also add more advanced authoring tools
that can enable presenters to fine-tune the look and the behavior of the agent.
For questions about this work please contact me via the email on the slide.