Dehumanizing Voice Technology: Phonetic & Experiential Consequences of Restricted Human-Machine Interaction

TL;DR

This study investigates how the syntactical structure of voice interactions with smart devices influences consumer experience and vocal features, revealing that request-based interactions foster more natural communication and affect phonetic patterns.

Contribution

It is the first to systematically examine how input modality changes impact both subjective consumer experience and objective phonetic features in voice interactions.

Findings

Requests increase phonetic convergence and lower phonetic latency.

Request-based interactions lead to more natural task experiences.

Altered input modalities systematically affect vocal features and subjective experience.

Abstract

The use of natural language and voice-based interfaces gradu-ally transforms how consumers search, shop, and express their preferences. The current work explores how changes in the syntactical structure of the interaction with conversational interfaces (command vs. request based expression modalities) negatively affects consumers' subjective task enjoyment and systematically alters objective vocal features in the human voice. We show that requests (vs. commands) lead to an in-crease in phonetic convergence and lower phonetic latency, and ultimately a more natural task experience for consumers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work docu-menting that altering the input modality of how consumers interact with smart objects systematically affects consumers' IoT experience. We provide evidence that altering the required input to initiate a conversation with smart objects provokes systematic changes both in terms of consumers' subjective experience and objective phonetic changes in the human voice. The current research also makes a methodological con-tribution by highlighting the unexplored potential of feature extraction in human voice as a novel data format linking consumers' vocal features during speech formation and their sub-jective task experiences.