Urgency Builds Trust: A Voice Agent's Emotional Expression in an Emergency

Voice agents play a crucial role in providing verbal guidance to users, especially during emergency situations to ensure their successful evacuation. While the vocal presentation of emotion significantly impacts communication effectiveness in human-agent interaction, the context-dependent impacts of emotional voice in an emergency setting remain unexplored. This study investigates the effects of voice agents’ emotional expressions conveyed through tone (i.e., Calm vs. Urgent) during a fire emergency simulation. Participants (N=30) conducted an online simulation game where a voice agent instruct them on how to evacuate from a building, while their evacuation time was tracked. After the game, participants evaluated the task experience and the voice agent’s trustworthiness and context-appropriateness. Results show that the voice agent using an urgent voice increased the participants’ cognitive trust in the agent and context-appropriateness to the emergency, compared to the agent using a calm voice. The study findings provide design implications for a voice agent’s emergency instructions, aiming for an effective evacuation process.