Which Voice Do You want To Hear From Your Automated Vehicle? User Preference on In-Vehicle Intelligent Agent Voice in Automated Vehicles

Abstract

Voice characteristics are important considerations when designing in-vehicle intelligent agents (IVIAs). We aimed to investigate the relationship between AVs' appearance and IVIAs voices. A user experiment on the preference for voices of IVIAs in AVs was designed and conducted to achieve the objective. In the experiment, 84 voices were created with the combinations of gender, communication style, and situations. The Participants were asked to select one of two voices after playing two randomly selected voices, and a total of 798 selection data was collected. We found their preferences by analyzing the ratio of selection frequency in different categories. Among two vehicle appearance features, significant differences were only found depending on the vehicle type. This experiment was a preliminary study to investigate user preference for IVIA's voices from various perspectives. We hope that this effort will contribute to developing and designing IVIAs.