Speech-based disclosure systems: Effects of modality, gender of prompt, and gender of user

Disclosure of personal information is valuable to individuals, governments, and corporations. This experiment explores the role interface design plays in maximizing disclosure. Participants (N = 100) were asked to disclose personal information to a telephone-based speech user interface (SUI) in a 3 (recorded speech vs. synthesized speech vs. text-based interface) by 2 (gender of participant) by 2 (gender of voice) between-participants experiment (with no voice manipulation in the text conditions). Synthetic speech participants exhibited significantly less disclosure and less comfort with the system than text-based or recorded-speech participants. Females were more sensitive to differences between synthetic and recorded speech. There were significant interactions between modality and gender of speech, while there were no gender identification effects. Implications for the design of speech-based information-gathering systems are outlined.