Exploratory Study on the Perception of Intelligent Virtual Agents With Non-Native Accents Using Synthetic and Natural Speech in German
David Obremski, Helena Babette Hering, Paula Friedrich, Birgit Lugrin · 2022
This paper presents an exploratory study which investigates the impact of different non-native accents and the naturalness of speech on the correct assignment of an Intelligent Virtual Agent’s (IVA) mother tongue, as well as its perceived warmth, competence and intelligibility. An online-experiment with a between subjects design was conducted, in which the participants, who were native speakers of German, watched a video of an IVA that spoke German with a non-native accent. The IVA’s speech was either synthetically generated or pre-recorded using non-native speakers. The participants experienced an IVA with either a Turkish, Italian or Polish accent, based on the most frequent accents in the German-speaking area. The results revealed that the IVA’s accent impacted its perceived warmth, but not its perceived competence and intelligibility. The IVA’s naturalness of speech played no role in its classification as a non-native speaker of German but on the correctness of the assigned mother tongue within the Polish accent condition. These results give valuable insight in the perception of non-native speaking IVAs and constitute helpful implications for future research with mixed-cultural IVAs.