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Assessing Synthetic Voices for Mental Health Chatbots

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Proceedings of Eighth International Congress on Information and Communication Technology (ICICT 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 695))

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Abstract

Considering the possibility to exploit information and communication technologies (ICT) and specifically speaking chatbots, in the mental health domain, a study is proposed aimed at testing the perceptual features of different synthetic voices considering some fundamental aspects of human–computer interaction, namely users’ acceptance and expectations. More specifically, the effect of synthetic voices’ gender and quality on user’s preferences were investigated. The study involved 40 participants, recruited in Northern Ireland, split into two groups: mental health experts and participants living with depression and/or anxiety. Six synthetic voices, three females and three males, characterized by different quality levels were developed for the experiment, exploiting free online synthesizers. The Virtual Agent Voice Acceptance Questionnaire (VAVAQ) was used to collect data regarding preferences toward the different synthetic voices. Results showed that participants’ preferences seem to be affected by both the gender and the quality of a synthetic voice. In particular, participants preferred female voices and high-quality voices. Results also seem to suggest that the quality of a synthetic voice could have a stronger impact on users’ evaluations compared to voice’s gender.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by the following projects:

• Project EMPATHIC, N. 769872, Horizon 2020

• Project MENHIR, N. 823907, Horizon 2020

• Project SIROBOTICS, Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università, e della Ricerca (MIUR)

• Project ANDROIDS, N. 157264, V: ALERE 2019.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy

    Terry Amorese, Marialucia Cuciniello, Gennaro Cordasco & Anna Esposito

  2. Action Mental Health, Newtownards, Northern Ireland, UK

    Gavin McConvey

  3. School of Computing, Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK

    Raymond Bond & Maurice Mulvenna

  4. School of Psychology, Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK

    Edel Ennis

  5. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Zoraida Callejas

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  1. Terry Amorese
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  2. Gavin McConvey
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  3. Marialucia Cuciniello
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  4. Gennaro Cordasco
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  5. Raymond Bond
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  6. Maurice Mulvenna
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  7. Edel Ennis
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  8. Zoraida Callejas
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  9. Anna Esposito
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Terry Amorese .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Design Engineering and Mathematics, Middlesex University London, London, UK

    Xin-She Yang

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    R. Simon Sherratt

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Techno International New Town, Chakpachuria, West Bengal, India

    Nilanjan Dey

  4. Global Knowledge Research Foundation, Ahmedabad, India

    Amit Joshi

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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Amorese, T. et al. (2024). Assessing Synthetic Voices for Mental Health Chatbots. In: Yang, XS., Sherratt, R.S., Dey, N., Joshi, A. (eds) Proceedings of Eighth International Congress on Information and Communication Technology. ICICT 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 695. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3043-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3043-2_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-99-3042-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-3043-2

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