Online consumer trust and live help interfaces: The effects of text-to-speech voice and three-dimensional avatars

With the increasing prevalence of online shopping, many companies have begun to provide "live help" functions, through instant messaging or text chatting, on their Web sites to facilitate interactions between online consumers and customer service representatives (CSRs). The continuing reliance of these functions on text-based communication limits nonverbal communication with consumers and the social contexts for the information conveyed. However, with the help of emerging multimedia technologies, companies can now use computer-generated voice and humanoid avatars to embody CSRs, thus enriching the interactive experiences of their customers. In this study, a laboratory experiment was conducted to empirically test the effects of text-to-speech (TTS) voice and 3-dimensional (3D) avatars on consumer trust toward CSRs. TTS voice was implemented to deliver answers aloud. A 3D avatar served as the humanoid representation of a CSR. The results demonstrated that the presence of TTS voice significantly increases consumers' cognitive and emotional trust toward the CSR. These findings offer practitioners guidelines to improve the interface design of real-time human-to-human communications for e-commerce Web sites.