Voice Persona Search Engine

Abstract

Although there is a potential demand for customizing voices, most customization is limited to the visual appearance of a figure (e.g., avatars). To better understand users’ needs, we first conducted an online survey with 104 participants. Then, we conducted a semi-structured interview with a prototype involving 14 participants to identify design considerations for supporting voice customization. The results show that there is a desire for voice customization, especially for non-face-to-face conversations with unfamiliar individuals. Additionally, findings revealed that different voices are favored for different contexts, from an enhanced version of one’s own voice for improving delivery to a completely different voice for securing identity. As future work, we plan to extend this study by investigating voice synthesis techniques for end-users who wish to design their own voices for various contexts.

Project Overview

We confirmed through a survey study that people tend to have different personas suited to various situations. Next, we identified the demand for customized voices and used Amazon mTurk crowdsourcing to collect labels for 2,140 voice samples. After designing the UI in Figma, we developed a web app that allows users to search for voices based on these labels. Finally, through a user study, we gathered feedback on the system’s usability and identified specific personas of preferred voices for different situations.

Prototype Design

Search Engine Interface