Design of Voice Alarms—the Benefit of Mentioning Fire and the Use of a Synthetic Voice

Abstract

Preliminary results from a study about voice alarms are presented in this paper. The purpose of the study is to explore both how messages should be worded and how they should be presented. The paper focuses on an introductory questionnaire study at an IKEA store and unannounced evacuation experiments at Lund University. The results of these activities suggest that it is preferable to mention the word ‘fire’ in voice alarms since it makes people remember the content of the message more accurately. No difference could be detected between messages that were read by a human and a synthetic (computer generated) voice.