The Effects of Timbre on Voice Interaction

With the development of voice interaction and speech synthesis technology, the impact of different audio timbres on user experience is particularly important. This study focuses on the voice transmission of news information, taking users’ subjective emotional experience as the starting point, and conducts relevant experimental research to investigate the impact of different timbres on user experience in the process of voice interaction. This study conducted an experiment in which two types of data were collected from 30 participants each, including PAD scale data and behavioural questionnaire data to measure subjective emotional experience, and skin potential data to measure objective physiological indicators. The experimental data showed that different timbre gender and type elicited different emotions from the users. The timbre gender had a significant effect on the standard deviation of the skin conductance, i.e. the level of emotional arousal; the timbre type had a significant effect on the participants’ interest; the news type also influenced the level of interest and the users’ evaluation. Timbre gender and news category had a significant interaction effect, as did timbre type and news category, which influenced the degree of matching and user evaluation. Finally, based on the results, this paper further discusses the conclusions related to timbre gender, timbre type and news type, and gives practical suggestions for the design of speech interaction systems.