Manipulative design in user interfaces (conceptualized as dark patterns) has emerged as a significant impediment to the ethical design of technology and a threat to user agency and freedom of choice. While previous research focused on exploring these patterns in the context of graphical user interfaces, the impact of speech has largely been overlooked. We conducted a listening test (N = 50) to elicit participants’ preferences regarding different synthetic voices that varied in terms of synthesis method (concatenative vs. neural) and prosodic qualities (speech pace and pitch variance), and then evaluated their impact in an online decision-making study (N = 101).
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Impact of Voice Fidelity on Decision Making: A Potential Dark Pattern?
It is indicated that the voice’s perceived engagement, ease of understanding, and domain fit directly translate to its impact on participants’ behavior in decision-making tasks.