Can Voice Assistants Sound Cute? Towards a Model of Kawaii Vocalics
This work addresses the design of voice assistants for user experience, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models of kawaii and focuses on initial exploration.
The study tackled the problem of whether voices can be perceived as 'kawaii' (cute) by exploring vocal qualities in voice assistant speech, finding that kawaii-ness intersects with perceptions of gender, age, fluency, and artificiality in Japanese computer voices.
The Japanese notion of "kawaii" or expressions of cuteness, vulnerability, and/or charm is a global cultural export. Work has explored kawaii-ness as a design feature and factor of user experience in the visual appearance, nonverbal behaviour, and sound of robots and virtual characters. In this initial work, we consider whether voices can be kawaii by exploring the vocal qualities of voice assistant speech, i.e., kawaii vocalics. Drawing from an age-inclusive model of kawaii, we ran a user perceptions study on the kawaii-ness of younger- and older-sounding Japanese computer voices. We found that kawaii-ness intersected with perceptions of gender and age, i.e., gender ambiguous and girlish, as well as VA features, i.e., fluency and artificiality. We propose an initial model of kawaii vocalics to be validated through the identification and study of vocal qualities, cognitive appraisals, behavioural responses, and affective reports.