Conference proceeding
A New Uncanny Valley? The Effects of Speech Fidelity and Human Listener Gender on Social Perceptions of a Virtual-Human Speaker
Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp 1-11
29 Apr 2022
Abstract
Virtual humans can be used to deliver persuasive arguments; yet, those with synthetic text-to-speech (TTS) have been perceived less favorably than those with recorded human speech. In this paper, we investigate standard concatenative TTS and more advanced neural TTS. We conducted a 3x2 between-subjects experiment (n=79) to evaluate the effect of a virtual human’s speech fidelity at three levels (Standard TTS, Neural TTS, and Human speech) and the listener’s gender (male or female) on perceptions and persuasion. We found that the virtual human was perceived as significantly less trustworthy by both genders, if they used neural TTS compared to human speech, while male listeners (but not females) also perceived standard TTS as less trustworthy than human speech. Our findings indicate that neural TTS may not be an effective choice for persuasive virtual humans and that gender of the listener plays a role in how virtual humans are perceived.
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Details
- Title
- A New Uncanny Valley? The Effects of Speech Fidelity and Human Listener Gender on Social Perceptions of a Virtual-Human Speaker
- Creators
- Tiffany D. Do - Computer Science, University of Central Florida, United StatesRyan P. McMahan - University of Central FloridaPamela J. Wisniewski - University of Central FloridaACM
- Contributors
- Simone Barbosa (Editor) - Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de JaneiroCliff Lampe (Editor) - University of Michigan, USACaroline Appert (Editor) - Université Paris-SaclayDavid A. Shamma (Editor) - Toyota Research InstituteSteven Drucker (Editor) - Microsoft Research, USAJulie Williamson (Editor) - University of GlasgowKoji Yatani (Editor) - The University of Tokyo
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp 1-11
- Conference
- CHI '22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Series
- ACM Conferences
- Publisher
- ACM
- Number of pages
- 11
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science (Computing)
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000922929502031
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85130564576
- Other Identifier
- 991021916517904721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Cybernetics