Pedagogical agents’ personas: Which affects more, image or voice?

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of image and voice of pedagogical agents on student perception and learning. Pedagogical agents were developed with differing image (expert-like vs. mentor-like) and voice (strong vs. calm vs. computer-generated), but with identical gesture, affect, comments, and gender. 109 undergraduates in a computer literacy course were randomly assigned to one of the six conditions. The results revealed a significant main effect for agent image on role perception: the mentor-like image was perceived as more motivating, as hypothesized. Also, there was a significant main effect for voice: the strong voice was overall most motivating, while both human voices (strong or calm) were perceived as more affable, affective, credible, and facilitating learning than the computer-generated voice. There was no significant effect of agent image and voice on learning