Survey finds listeners want a human voice for their AI

New research from Voicebot.ai, Voices.com, and Pulselabs explored consumer preferences in voice assistant technology. The survey found that users much prefer the AI to have a human voice rather than a synthetic one, with human voices scoring 71.6% higher. Human-sounding voices had a 70.8% favorable rating and 12.5% unfavorable, compared with just 12.3% favorable rating and 60.1% unfavorable for the synthetic voices.

The preferences varied little by the respondents’ gender, but the results found age was a more noteworthy factor. Ages 30-59 had the smallest disparity in scores for human and synthetic voices, with human ones scoring 66.1% higher. The 60+ group had the largest divide, with human voices scoring 91.4% higher than synthetic ones.

The survey also explored how listeners responded to different AI voices and types of interactions. The call-to-action recall when hearing a human voice was more than double the result for either long or short recordings of synthetic poly voices.

The survey included 240 panelists.