Linguistics

Philosophy

Communication

Social psychology

Computer security

Closeness

Pedagogy

Psychiatry

Computer science

Anxiety

Internet privacy

Psychology

Mathematics

Applied psychology

Mathematical analysis

Social anxiety

Interpersonal communication

Public speaking

TUTOR

Human–computer interaction

Affect (linguistics)

Speech recognition

Multimedia

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.

Alexa as Coach: Leveraging Smart Speakers to Build Social Agents that Reduce Public Speaking Anxiety