A synthetic voice personifies the system using it. In this work we examine the impact text content, voice quality and synthesis system have on the perceived personality of two synthetic voices. Subjects rated synthetic utterances based on the Big-Five personality traits and naturalness. The naturalness rating of synthesis output did not correlate significantly with any Big-Five characteristic except for a marginal correlation with openness. Although text content is dominant in personality judgments, results showed that voice quality change implemented using a unit selection synthesis system significantly affected the perception of the Big-Five, for example tense voice being associated with being disagreeable and lax voice with lower conscientiousness. In addition a comparison between a parametric implementation and unit selection implementation of the same voices showed that parametric voices were rated as significantly less neurotic than both the text alone and the unit selection system, while the unit selection was rated as more open than both the text alone and the parametric system. The results have implications for synthesis voice and system type selection for applications such as personal assistants and embodied conversational agents where developing an emotional relationship with the user, or developing a branding experience is important.

中文翻译：

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生成人工人格的语音合成

合成语音将使用它的系统拟人化。在这项工作中，我们研究了文本内容、语音质量和合成系统对两种合成声音的感知个性的影响。受试者根据大五人格特征和自然性对合成话语进行评分。除了与开放性的边际相关性之外，合成输出的自然度评级与任何大五特征没有显着相关性。虽然文本内容在性格判断中占主导地位，但结果表明，使用单元选择合成系统实现的语音质量变化显着影响了五巨头的感知，例如紧张的声音与令人不快的声音和松散的声音相关联，责任心较低。此外，对相同声音的参数化实现和单元选择实现之间的比较表明，参数化声音被评为比单独的文本和单元选择系统明显更少神经质，而单元选择被评为比文本更开放单独和参数系统。结果对个人助理和实体对话代理等应用程序的合成语音和系统类型选择具有影响，在这些应用程序中，与用户建立情感关系或开发品牌体验很重要。