Persuasive Synthetic Speech: Voice Perception and User Behaviour
Open accessAbstract
Previous research indicates that synthetic speech can be as persuasive as human speech. However, there is a lack of empirical validation on interactive goal-oriented tasks. In our two-stage study (online listening test and lab evaluation), we compared participants' perception of the persuasiveness of synthetic voices created from speech in a debating style vs. speech from audio-books. Participants interacted with our Conversational Agent (CA) to complete 4 flight-booking tasks and were asked to evaluate the voice, message and perceived personal qualities. We found that participants who interacted with the CA using the voice created from debating style speech rated it as significantly more truthful and more involved than the CA using the audio-book-based voice. However, there was no difference in how frequently each group followed the CA's recommendations. We hope our investigation will provoke discussion about the impact of different synthetic voices on users' perceptions of CAs in goal-oriented tasks.
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Prior research such as Dubiel et al. has indicated that even minor variations in voice characteristics can significantly influence user perceptions.
“Given that prior research, such as Dubiel et al. [26, 27], has indicated that even minor variations in voice characteristics can significantly influence user perceptions, we decided to adopt a synthetic voice for the user role as well.”
From Examining Humanness as a Metaphor to Design Voice User Interfaces (2024) · cites this paper as [26]
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Examining Humanness as a Metaphor to Design Voice User Interfaces
Desai, S., Dubiel, M., & Leiva, L. A. (2024) · ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2024 · doi:10.1145/3640794.3665535 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Self-citationImpact of Voice Fidelity on Decision Making: A Potential Dark Pattern?
Dubiel, M., Sergeeva, A., & Leiva, L. A. (2024) · Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces · doi:10.1145/3640543.3645202 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Self-citationWei, C. Z., Kim, Y.-H., & Kuzminykh, A. (2023) · Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces · doi:10.1145/3571884.3597139 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
- Authors
- Dubiel, M., Halvey, M., Gallegos, P. O., & King, S.
- Affiliations
- University of Strathclyde (GB)
- University of Edinburgh (GB)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-07-22
- Pages
- 1-9
- OpenAlex
- W3042754020
- Cited by
- 28
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 1.34
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) (publishedVersion)
- Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Strathprints: The University of Strathclyde institutional repository (University of Strathclyde) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- synthetic speech, persuasive speech, chatbots, speech synthesis, goal-oriented interaction, perceived truthfulness, user engagement, airline reservations
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