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Expanding a Large Inclusive Study of Human Listening Rates

Expanding a Large Inclusive Study of Human Listening Rates As conversational agents and digital assistants become increasingly pervasive, understanding their synthetic speech becomes increasingly important. Simultaneously, speech synthesis is becoming more sophisticated and manipulable, providing the opportunity to optimize speech rate to save users time. However, little is known about people’s abilities to understand fast speech. In this work, we provide an extension of the first large-scale study on human listening rates, enlarging the prior study run with 453 participants to 1,409 participants and adding new analyses on this larger group. Run on LabintheWild, it used volunteer participants, was screen reader accessible, and measured listening rate by accuracy at answering questions spoken by a screen reader at various rates. Our results show that people who are visually impaired, who often rely on audio cues and access text aurally, generally have higher listening rates than sighted people. The findings also suggest a need to expand the range of rates available on personal devices. These results demonstrate the potential for users to learn to listen to faster rates, expanding the possibilities for human-conversational agent interaction. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) Association for Computing Machinery

Expanding a Large Inclusive Study of Human Listening Rates

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References (97)

Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 ACM
ISSN
1936-7228
eISSN
1936-7236
DOI
10.1145/3461700
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

As conversational agents and digital assistants become increasingly pervasive, understanding their synthetic speech becomes increasingly important. Simultaneously, speech synthesis is becoming more sophisticated and manipulable, providing the opportunity to optimize speech rate to save users time. However, little is known about people’s abilities to understand fast speech. In this work, we provide an extension of the first large-scale study on human listening rates, enlarging the prior study run with 453 participants to 1,409 participants and adding new analyses on this larger group. Run on LabintheWild, it used volunteer participants, was screen reader accessible, and measured listening rate by accuracy at answering questions spoken by a screen reader at various rates. Our results show that people who are visually impaired, who often rely on audio cues and access text aurally, generally have higher listening rates than sighted people. The findings also suggest a need to expand the range of rates available on personal devices. These results demonstrate the potential for users to learn to listen to faster rates, expanding the possibilities for human-conversational agent interaction.

Journal

ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jul 21, 2021

Keywords: Synthetic speech

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