Oneyng robot voice11/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Google Duplex, to mention one of the more recent innovations in the field of speech synthesis, gives us a glimpse of the future where computer voices might actually be indistinguishable from real people ( Oord et al., 2016 Google Duplex, 2018). Over the upcoming years, it is thus clear that ever more people will use spoken language to interact with machines-and these machines will eventually sound more and more human-like ( Meinecke, 2019 Statista, 2021). By 2024, the number of digital voice assistants is predicted to reach 8.4 billion units, a number greater than the world’s human population ( Juniper, 2019 Statista, 2021). Around the world, 4.2 billion digital voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, are already employed. They are supposed to assist us in a range of activities, be it performing an online search, navigating the way, or just letting us know when the spaghetti is ready. Talking machines have found a place in our lives. Study results are discussed in the light of the presented theory and in relation to open research questions in the field of synthetic voice design. ![]() While most personality factors did not prove influential, openness to experience was found to moderate the relationship between voice type and user acceptance such that individuals with higher openness scores rated the most human-like voice even more positively. In terms of application context, participants overall indicated lower acceptance of the use of speech interfaces in social domains (care, companionship) than in others (e.g., information & navigation), though the most human-like voice was rated significantly more acceptable in social applications than the remaining four. Participants were also more likely to assign real human names to the voice (e.g., “Julia” instead of “T380”) if it sounded more realistic. Our results indicate a positive relationship between human-likeness and user acceptance, with the most realistic sounding voice scoring highest in pleasantness and lowest in eeriness. Additionally, participants completed Big Five personality measures and a tolerance of ambiguity scale. We assessed how much participants anthropomorphized the voice (by subjective human-likeness ratings, a name-giving task and an imagination task), how pleasant and how eerie they found it, and to what extent they would accept its use in various domains. In a randomized laboratory experiment, 165 participants listened to one of five female-sounding robot voices, each with a different degree of human realism. To avoid detrimental effects of synthetic voice design, it is therefore crucial to explore what level of human realism human interactors prefer and whether their evaluations may vary across different domains of application. Previous research has been inconclusive about whether anthropomorphic design features of machines are more likely to be associated with positive user responses or, conversely, with uncanny experiences. The growing popularity of speech interfaces goes hand in hand with the creation of synthetic voices that sound ever more human. LIT Robopsychology Lab, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria. ![]()
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