A Study on Natural and Artificial Voices

„The Human Takes It All: Humanlike Synthesized Voices Are Perceived as Less Eerie and More Likable“ is the title of a study by Katharina Kühne, Prof. Dr. Martin H. Fischer and Dr. Yuefang Zhou (University of Potsdam) that has just been published. The project was started in 2018. From the results section of the article: „The human voice and human speaker characteristics received reliably higher scores on all dimensions except for eeriness. Synthesized voice ratings were positively related to participants‘ agreeableness and neuroticism. Females rated synthesized voices more positively on most dimensions. Surprisingly, interest in social robots and attitudes toward robots played almost no role in voice evaluation. Contrary to the expectations of an uncanny valley, when the ratings of human-likeness for both the voice and the speaker characteristics were higher, they seemed less eerie to the participants. Moreover, when the speaker’s voice was more humanlike, it was more liked by the participants. This latter point was only applicable to one of the synthesized voices. Finally, pleasantness and trustworthiness of the synthesized voice predicted the likability of the speaker’s voice. Qualitative content analysis identified intonation, sound, emotion, and imageability/embodiment as diagnostic features.“ (Frontier in Neurorobotics, 16 December 2020) Three of the voice samples were produced by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel (School of Business FHNW) and donated to the project. He has been researching synthetic voices and their modeling with SSML for years. The article can be accessed at www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2020.593732/full.

Fig.: A natural voice