Designing Gender Ambiguous Voice Agents

- Effects of Gender Ambiguous Voice Agents on Usability of Voice User Interfaces -

Abstract

Gender ambiguous voice agents have been considered as a way to reduce gender bias and harmful stereotyping on Voice User Interfaces (VUI). This study explores a method for designing gender ambiguous voice agents for VUIs and investigates its effects on two usability factors: Ease of Understanding and Pleasantness. To conduct this investigation, pitch shift is applied to morph nine voice agents towards the opposite gender, which six are natural voice agents from different positions in the gender spectrum and three are artificial. N=37 participants completed an online experiment to evaluate their perception of gender and usability factors in eighteen scenarios. Our findings indicate that pitch shift is effective in morphing the voice agents to sound as gender ambiguous, and that these voice agents have an effect on perception of the usability factors. Also, results showed that the participant gender impact on how the usability factors are perceived, mainly for Pleasantness.