When the tissue box says "Bless You"

Abstract

From the Internet of things to ubiquitous computing, smart objects are everywhere and have become an increasingly significant part of the information supply chain. However, these objects remain invisible to end-users mostly because they do not interact with them. Our project is devoted to brainstorming different design possibilities for building interfaces for these smart objects. This paper explores one such possibility-outfitting the object with a speech interface. Study participants (N = 63) witnessed the experimenter sneezing, followed by a "Bless You" from either a nearby tissue box, a robot in the room, or a person in the room. Surprisingly, users found the speaking tissue box to be as social and agentic as a humanoid robot and a human. We also found significant moderating effects of users' preference for consistency, parasocial tendency and power usage. Participants who scored high on these traits were more likely to regard the study object as intelligent and likeable. Users also tended to show the same non-verbal reactions to the tissue box as they would to a human or a robot.