Can You Say This for Me? Speaking Up by Proxy in Co-Located Discussion

Abstract

Equal participation in co-located discussion is important for effective collaboration, yet people often hold back when they anticipate negative interpersonal or professional consequences, especially when raising a point requires voicing it themselves. We present SecondVoice, a mixed-reality system that enables people to speak up through an embodied virtual proxy. By separating what is said from who says it, SecondVoice brings hesitant points into the live spoken discussion without putting the speaker on the spot. Using a private overlay, users specify their intent through a structured specification process rather than composing a full utterance. The system reformulates the input and voices it into the conversation through the proxy. We characterize a design space of participation channels under social risk. In a preliminary within-subject study (N = 16), we compare the complete SecondVoice system with an anonymous text-board channel across two group discussion tasks. Half of participants reported using SecondVoice for a point they did not say aloud, compared with 18.8% for the text board. Proxy-delivered points entered the spoken floor and were followed by multi-turn group engagement, which we did not observe after text-board posts. Participants described the channel as situationally valuable but identified tradeoffs around timing, ownership, and trust in reformulation.