Virtual Influencers and Human Influencers: Perceptions of Young University Students about Voice and Communication

• Grant number: 25/08735-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: June 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Speech Therapy
• Principal Investigator: Nair Katia Nemr
• Grantee: Gabrielle Lemos da Costa
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina (FM). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

A social media influencer is defined as an individual who, on social media, assists potential consumers in their purchasing decisions by influencing their opinions through social media. An example of this is virtual influencers, which are computer-generated personas designed to interact with audiences on social media platforms, simulating human characteristics through advanced graphics and artificial intelligence. Currently, virtual influencers have been actively introduced as endorsers of brands in various sectors, including food, fashion, beauty, lifestyle, mobile devices, automobiles, banking and home shopping.In view of this, this is an exploratory cross-sectional study that seeks to understand the aspects of communication and voice of virtual influencers and how close they are to human communication, through the perception of young university students, especially in contexts of product advertising and content creation on social media. Thus, advertising audios of similar products and content creation audios about electronic games that were available to the general public on widely accessible social media platforms, such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, were selected. In this study, the audio recordings will be presented to up to 100 young university students, aged between 18 and 40 years, regardless of their sex and gender, and regardless of their undergraduate course, except for students in the Speech Therapy course from all periods. After each audio recording, participants will be asked to answer a questionnaire adapted from the expressiveness protocol via Google Forms.