Speaker Hand-Offs in Collaborative Human-Agent Oral Presentations

Prasanth Murali, Lazlo Ring, Ha Trinh, Reza Asadi, Timothy W. Bickmore

Abstract: Prior studies of public speaking behavior have demonstrated that public speaking anxiety monotonically decreases with the number of co-presenters giving an oral presentation and increases with the size of the audience. However, speaker "hand off" behavior---the verbal and nonverbal cues used to transition from one speaker to another---and its effect on speaker anxiety and presentation quality has not been systematically studied. In this work we report on two empirical studies of speaker hand-off behavior used during human co-presentations. We find that the cues used for hand-offs during prepared and rehearsed presentations differ significantly from the cues observed in face-to-face conversational turn-taking. We describe two systems that leverage automatic recognition of these verbal and nonverbal cues to drive hand-offs during co-presentations with a life-sized virtual agent.