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abstract

Effect of voice imitation using voice conversion by avatar on customer service in Virtual Environments

Published: 09 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate the impact of voice imitation on rapport building in customer service in a virtual environment(VE). We simulated a VE store and conducted a within-subject experiment in three customer service scenarios with 16 participants. The imitation condition used a voice generated by a machine learning model to reproduce the participant’s linguistic content, with the voice identity set midway between the participant and the salesperson. In a group of men, voice imitation significantly improved their impression of salespeople. The findings of this study can be used to design interpersonal services in VE with the help of salesperson avatar voice design.

Supplemental Material

MP4 File
Appendix(Demonstration video of imitated voice)

References

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Korrina A Duffy and Tanya L Chartrand. 2015. The extravert advantage: How and when extraverts build rapport with other people. Psychological Science 26, 11 (2015), 1795–1802.
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Dwayne D Gremler and Kevin P Gwinner. 2000. Customer-employee rapport in service relationships. Journal of service research 3, 1 (2000), 82–104.
[3]
Joanna Hale and Antonia F De C Hamilton. 2016. Testing the relationship between mimicry, trust and rapport in virtual reality conversations. Scientific reports 6, 1 (2016), 35295.
[4]
Yinghao Aaron Li, Ali Zare, and Nima Mesgarani. 2021. Starganv2-vc: A diverse, unsupervised, non-parallel framework for natural-sounding voice conversion. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.10394 (2021).
[5]
Nichola Lubold, Erin Walker, and Heather Pon-Barry. 2016. Effects of voice-adaptation and social dialogue on perceptions of a robotic learning companion. In 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). IEEE, 255–262.
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William W Maddux, Elizabeth Mullen, and Adam D Galinsky. 2008. Chameleons bake bigger pies and take bigger pieces: Strategic behavioral mimicry facilitates negotiation outcomes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, 2 (2008), 461–468.
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Zhikang Peng, Zhiguo Hu, Xinyu Wang, Tiantian Jiao, Hanxiaoran Li, and Hongyan Liu. 2021. Gender context modulation on the self-enhancement effect of vocal attractiveness evaluation. PsyCh Journal 10, 6 (2021), 858–867.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    VRST '23: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology
    October 2023
    542 pages
    ISBN:9798400703287
    DOI:10.1145/3611659
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 09 October 2023

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