# The Impact of an Agent's Voice in Psychological Counseling: Session Evaluation and Counselor Rating
## 6 Discussion
Therefore, it can be analyzed that empirical stereotypes of subjects affected the result related to expertness. [PERSON] [71] argued that stereotypes of people can make themselves believe that older instructors have a higher level of knowledge and wisdom than younger instructors. According to psychological counseling studies, the counselors who aged more than the clients resulted in higher counseling performances, compared to the counselors who aged less than [57]. This result verified that, when delivering same contents, positive interactions between the agent and users can be derived through increasing the level of expertness perceived through the voice of the agent by users. Regarding the counseling effects, only characteristics related to depth exhibited a significant difference according to the voice of the agent. Conforming with the result on expertness, subjects considered that the agent using an older voice had a higher level of depth than those using a younger voice. [PERSON] [72] stated that the counseling effects were determined by the perception of counselees of the counseling actions. That is, the counseling effects were affected by the degree of perception of counselees toward counselors. In particular, counselors who were considered more professional and attractive by counselees exhibited a greater influence than counselors who were not [73]. The results of this study show that the agent using an older female voice exhibited the highest level of expertness, attractiveness, and depth perceived by subjects. As explained above, the perception of counselees toward counselors affected counseling during traditional psychological counseling, and this is verified by the observations of this study. Therefore, it can be concluded that counseling based on the agent using the older female voice can exert positive effects on the perception and the experience of counselees in the fields of eHealth, including psychological counseling. Conversely, the characteristics related to the dimensions of smoothness and trustworthiness showed an insignificant difference according to the voice of the agent. This study designed the psychological counseling agent for the experiment in which the entire subjects joined counseling under the same counseling scenario. This result implies that the characteristics related to the dimensions of smoothness and trustworthiness might be affected by psychological counseling scenarios. In this regard, such possibility in consideration of other potential factors should be examined through further research. This study changed the voice of the agent based on age and gender, the most fundamental demographic factors, and verified a significant difference according to the voice of the agent. Despite the results of this study, the range of voice control factors and subjects must be gradually expanded in further research. When people practically communicate with each other or have counseling with counselors, they adjust the pitch of their voices as well as the speed and the interval of conversation. Furthermore, people tend to personify agents and expect human characteristics from them during their conversation with agents. Hence, an appropriate voice alternation technology should be developed and applied in the agent to satisfy such expectations and keep up with the automation of interactions through conversations. Moreover, the results of the study which showed that the agent with the older voice was perceived to have a higher level of depth and expertness over the agent with the younger voice might have been affected by age and stereotypes of subjects of this study. This study was conducted with subjects with an average of 25 years of age. The [PERSON]'s Age Stereotypes Interactions Model [74] and conventional educational communication research asserted that the older voice may convey the traditional age stereotypes of wisdom and intelligence [71].