Hello there.
This talk is about the needs for end-user voice customization
and how it can be supported.
This work done with Hyeon Jeon Byeon, Jeemin Lee
and Uran Oh at Ewha Womans University,
and I’m the presenter, Chaerin Lee.
The pandemic has caused people to socially distance themselves from each other,
which has changed the way they interact.
As a result, many of social gathering has moved to the metaverse.
One of the main features of the metaverse is avatar customization.
However, most are focused on visual appearances.
While there is little or no support for voice customization.
There are potential benefits of supporting voice customization.
At first, it helps users express themselves in virtual space
by reflecting identity more precisely.
Secondly, it supports anonymous communication
by protecting personal information such as age or gender.
And also, it can improve accessibility for people
with hearing or speech impairments
by providing personalized synthetic voices.
To investigate the needs for end-user voice customization
and how we can support it, we conducted two studies.
First, we conducted an online survey to understand
the willingness and concerns of using voice customization.
Four different situations were presented based on
the who they are communicating with and the purpose.
Next, we conducted an interview to identify design considerations for supporting voice customization.
Participants were asked to describe the voice they desire for different situations,
similar to study 1, and choose the voice with our prototype.
Here’s our design probe.
We created a web interface with several filters.
First, there are drop-down menus to select gender and age group.
And there are parts to choose 4 voice attributes in a 3-point scale.
After selection, voice samples are displayed
so that participants can hear a specific voice.
Here’s a demonstration video of our prototype.
So, we had three research questions about end-user voice customization:
First, how do individuals wish to change their voice in what circumstances?
Participants were more willing to use voice customization
under unfamiliar circumstances regardless of social or business-related.
When asked for the reasons, most of the participants responded that
they wish to communicate anonymously in unfamiliar situations.
In Business_related situation, the reason is different.
Participants want others to concentrate only on the context, not the voice.
In particular, most participants were more concerned
to use voice customization under familiar circumstances
whether social or business-related.
Mainly because they were concerned that
others would find their customized voice awkward,
or they would feel awkward about themselves.
Indeed, this response was higher when talking to someone
they know than someone they hardly know.
Second question, what are the affecting factors for desiring certain voices?
We asked participants to describe the voice
that they would like to have a voice for each of the five scenarios.
In holiday greetings, most want to use their own voice
or better version of their voice.
Some wants a brighter voice.
Likewise, Many participants want their own voice,
and good delivery of voice for online classes.
Some wished for smart voice and calm voice.
For Team-based games, a male voice was the most wanted
followed by good delivery of voice.
In addition, there are responses like older or younger voice,
powerful voice, and deep voice.
Voice with good delivery was the most desired
for the customer services scenario.
Some wanted an unemotional voice.
Good delivery of voice was the most desired
for the YouTube channel as well.
Several participants answered that they want
their voice would be like professional,
and have a low variation in pitch.
As we've seen before,
the situation is an important one of the affecting factors.
The words of P8 illustrate this well.
"People are expected to wear different clothes depending on the situation.
Likewise, I think it is the same with the voice.
It needs to be tailored for the given situation.”
We asked “What voice attributes were the most useful while using our prototype?
The age group, gender, smoothness, and variation were chosen as the most useful.
Participants tended to choose attributes that they believe distinguish one voice from another.
In addition, we asked “What other voice attributes would be useful?”
There were pitch, speed, emotion, preciseness of the pronunciation and volume.
and there were personality and so on.
Finally, How can we design a voice customization tool to support end-users?
As a summary of this talk,
I would like to list our design recommendations.
The first one is that customized voice was not preferred when talking to acquaintances.
We recommend a voice customization tool to incorporate the user’s voice
when generating synthesized voices or listing voice candidates that sound like them.
The next one is that people wish to use different voices for different situations.
We recommend allowing users to create and save multiple voice profiles
so that they can easily switch between voices depending on the context.
And people wish for diverse options when customizing voices.
We recommend providing a list of hashtags
so that users can choose from various categories
like personalities or celebrity voices.
Here are our contributions.
First, we confirmed that there is a solid need for voice customization,
and secondly, we identified the design implications for end-user voice customization.
As a future work, we plan to create a voice dataset with various attributes,
and study voice synthesizer with attribute filters for end-users.
Here are the references.
Thank you for listening.
For more details, please check out our paper.
Again, I am Chaerin Lee and feel free to contact me for questions.