Social perception of male and female computer synthesized speech

The present study addressed the issue of whether social perception of human speech and computerized text-to-speech (TTS) is affected by gender of voice and gender of listener. Listeners were presented with a persuasive argument in either male or female human or synthetic voice and were assessed on attitude change and their ratings of various speech qualities. The results indicated that female human speech was rated as preferable to female synthetic speech, and that male synthetic speech was rated as preferable to female synthetic speech. Degree of persuasion did not differ across human and synthetic speech, however, female listeners were persuaded more by the argument than male listeners were. Patterns of ratings across male and female listeners were fairly similar across human and synthetic speech, suggesting that gender stereotyping for human voices and computerized voices may occur in a similar fashion.