Which synthetic voice should I choose for an evocative task?

Abstract

We explore different evaluation methods for 4 different synthetic voices and 1 human voice. We investigate whether intelligibility, naturalness, or likability of a voice is correlated to the voice's evocative function potential, a measure of the voice's ability to evoke an intended reaction from the listener. We also investigate the extent to which naturalness and likability ratings vary depending on whether or not exposure to a voice is extended and continuous vs. short-term and sporadic (interleaved with other voices). Finally, we show that an automatic test can replace the standard intelligibility tests for text-to-speech (TTS) systems, which eliminates the need to hire humans to perform transcription tasks saving both time and money.