Fotis Efthymiou is a Research Associate and PhD Candidate at the Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology at the University of St Gallen. He has as main research focus the interaction between humans and voice assistants. He is interested in the perception, behavioral and user experience alterations that occur due to systematic modifications to the paralinguistic components of the digital voice assistants.
Fotis received his B.Sc. in Social Sciences and Education from the University of Patras in 2015. During the time between his bachelor’s and master’s he joined the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Health (IFHN) of ETH in Zurich doing research in the field of Behavioral Neuroscience. Fotis completed an interdisciplinary M.Sc. in Neuroscience from the University of Geneva in 2019, during which he conducted research at the Addiction Division at the Department of Psychiatry in the field of Behavioral Addictions and also at the Campus Biotech in the Neuroscience in Finance and Economics lab.
Fotis’ interests are not limited to research. He also enjoys a basketball game and practising his judo skills. Except for sports he is a big fan of comedy and is intrigued by how jokes function in eliciting laughter.
Selected Publications
- Efthymiou, F. (2021) Engineering Power Attributions in Conversational Agents: The Unexplored Impact of Vocal Vibrato and Vocal Tract Length. Marketing Review St. Gallen, (4). 26-31. ISSN 1865-6544
- Efthymiou, F.; Hampton, W. H. & Hildebrand, C. (2021) How Big is That Voice? Vocal Tract Length of Conversational AI Affects Physicality Perceptions and Product Congruency. – Association for Consumer Research (ACR).
- Efthymiou, F.,; Hampton, W. H. & Hildebrand, C. (2021) How Big is That Voice? Vocal Features of Conversational AI Affects Physicality Perceptions and Product Congruency. – European Marketing Academy Virtual Conference (EMAC)
- Efthymiou, F., Hildebrand, C., (2020). Morphing Vulnerable Machines: Paralinguistic Cues in Digital Voice Assistants Shape Perceptions of Physicality, Vulnerability, and Trust. EMAC 2020 – The 49th Annual Conference of the European Marketing.
- Hildebrand, C., Efthymiou, F., Busquet, F., Hampton, W.H., Hoffman, D.L., & Novak, P.T. (2020). Voice Analytics in Business Research: Conceptual Foundation, Acoustic Feature Extraction, and Applications. Journal of Business Research.
