Effectiveness, attention, and recall of human and artificial voices in an advertising story. Prosody influence and functions of voices

Abstract

Many users are exposed every day to artificial voices in their different devices. Because of this, there is a growing interest both in improving the quality of these voices and in analyzing how they are perceived and processed. However, very little research has been conducted to examine nonverbal elements such as prosody. Accordingly, the first purpose of this study is to determine how artificial voices compared to human voices are processed in a narrative advertising story modifying prosody regarding effectiveness, attention, concentration, and recall. The second objective is to evaluate their functions for different applications, advertising among them. The results show that human voices are assessed as more effective and achieved a better level of effectiveness, attention, and recall with less concentration. Concerning the functions, the more important and complex a function is, the more a human voice is preferred over an artificial one.