Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Factor in Computer Voice

要旨

“Kawaii” is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand N = 512) with two varieties of computer voices: text-to-speech (TTS) and game character voices. We found kawaii “sweet spots” through manipulation of fundamental and formant frequencies, but only for certain voices and to a certain extent. Findings also suggest a ceiling effect for the kawaii vocalics of certain voices. We offer empirical validation of the preliminary kawaii vocalics model and an elementary method for manipulating kawaii perceptions of computer voice.

キーワード
Computer Voice
Kawaii Computing
Voice Interaction
Voice Assistants
Speech Signal Processing
Video Games
Character Design
Kawaii
Japan
著者
M
Yuto ai
Katie Seaborn
Tomoyasu Nakano
Xin Sun
Yijia Wang
Jun Kato
DOI

10.1145/3706598.3713709

論文URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713709

動画

会議: CHI 2025

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)

セッション: Stereotypes and Gender

G402
7 件の発表
2025-04-29 01:20:00
2025-04-29 02:50:00
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