Impact of English regional accents on user acceptance of voice user interfaces
Andreea Ioana Niculescu, George M. White, See Swee Lan, Ratna Utari Waloejo, Yoko Kawaguchi · 2008
In this paper we present an experiment addressing a critical issue in Voice User Interface (VUI) design, namely whether the user acceptance can be improved by having recorded voice prompts imitate his/her regional dialect. The claim was tested within a project aiming to develop voice animated virtual help desk assistants for intelligent mobile phone interfaces. 64 subjects native Singaporeans participated in the experiment, ranking speech quality, politeness, dialogue easiness and trustworthiness for two virtual help desk assistants: one speaking with Singaporean accent, the other one speaking with British accent. Contrary to our expectation and despite the identical content of the information presented the British accented assistant was in all categories higher ranked than its Singaporean counterpart. This result is explained by other cultural and psychological biases that dominate the expected effect of common ethnic background. We concluded that subjective preference for a voice accent obviously affects users perception of other system features but design stereotypes like "similarity attracts" are rather context dependent.