@inproceedings{a337f7ca61234a72b36f0706ecfc584f,
title = "Alexa as Coach: Leveraging Smart Speakers to Build Social Agents that Reduce Public Speaking Anxiety",
abstract = "Public speaking anxiety is one of the most common social phobias. We explore the feasibility of using a conversational agent to reduce this anxiety. We developed a public-speaking tutor on the Amazon Alexa platform that enables users to engage in cognitive reconstruction exercises. We also investigated how the sociability of the agent might affect its performance as a tutor. A user study of 53 college students with fear of public speaking showed that the interaction with the agent served to assuage pre-speech state anxiety. Agent sociability improved the sense of interpersonal closeness, which was associated with lower pre-speech anxiety. Moreover, sociability of the agent increased participants' satisfaction and their willingness to continue engagement. Our findings, thus, have implications not only for addressing public speaking anxiety in a scalable way but also for the design of future conversational agents using smart speaker platforms.",
keywords = "conversational agent, experiment, public speaking anxiety, sociability",
author = "Jinping Wang and Hyun Yang and Ruosi Shao and Saeed Abdullah and Sundar, \{S. Shyam\}",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 ACM.; 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2020 ; Conference date: 25-04-2020 Through 30-04-2020",
year = "2020",
month = apr,
day = "21",
doi = "10.1145/3313831.3376561",
language = "English",
series = "Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
booktitle = "CHI 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems",
}