The study investigates how verbal attunement and real‑time behavioral mimicry affect users’ perceptions of an embodied AI counselor in virtual reality. Participants interacted with a system that varied in verbal attunement (attuned vs. neutral) and behavioral mimicry (present vs. absent). Results indicated that verbal attunement most reliably increased perceived empathy, while mimicry had a marginal effect on perceived humanness and showed exploratory positive associations with empathy, positivity, and humanness, especially among female participants.
By Nathalia Gomez, Haig Shamlian, Omar Khan, Tiffany D. Do
arXiv:2609.13117v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Full-duplex evaluation often emphasizes whether an agent keeps speaking or stops. That binary cannot express a third response humans use routinely: con...
By Yunqi Lu, Tyler Baumgartner, Nikhil Johri, Brandon Tai, Candice Fan, Luc Debaupte, Ruben Aguilar, Bill Wang, Yi Zhong
arXiv:2604. 01562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Voice cloning is often evaluated in terms of overall quality, but less is known about accent preservation and its perceptual consequences.
By Tianle Yang, Chengzhe Sun, Phil Rose, Siwei Lyu
The paper introduces a lightweight backchannel head that predicts when a backchannel should begin in full-duplex spoken dialogue models, using the models’ hidden states. When the predicted probability exceeds a tunable threshold, a backchannel is force‑decoded. Experiments on 7B and 1B models show that the head generalizes across scale, aligns with human timing, and produces backchannels that human raters judge as comparable to real ones.
By Maike Z\"ufle, Peter Pol\'ak, Sefik Emre Eskimez, Jan Niehues, Peter Bell, Ond\v{r}ej Klejch
arXiv:2609.22913v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Talking-head and dyadic models now achieve real-time inference, yet fast motion generation alone does not produce an interactive conversation. A live...
By Artem Kravtsov, Dmitrii Ziganshin, Vsevolod Poletaev, Gleb Balitskiy, Anastasia Tikhonova, Egor Burkov, Vadim Lebedev
arXiv:2608. 15411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The ability of artificial intelligence (AI) models to generate highly realistic human voices has advanced rapidly.
By Chengzhe Sun, Tianle Yang, Siwei Lyu