Effects of AI-Powered Embodied Avatars on Communication Quality and Social Connection in Asynchronous Virtual Meetings

In plain English

The researchers built AVAGENTs — avatars that copy a person's speech and body language from recordings of meetings they attended, then answer questions from someone catching up later. In a 30-person study, people who watched an AVAGENT felt more social presence, more sense of belonging and more emotional closeness than those who watched a plain recording or used a voice-only AI assistant. For practitioners, this is evidence that the point of putting a face on an asynchronous catch-up is the felt connection, not the information — the same transcript delivered three ways produced different social outcomes.