Investigating the Relevancy of the Voice Effect With an Updated Text-to-Speech Engine

• In Event: Design for Virtual and Multimedia Environments

Abstract

One increasingly important aspect of instructional multimedia design is determining the type of voice that will provide the narration. Using a randomized pretest-posttest design, we examined the efficacy of learning from an instructional animation where narration was provided by an older text-to-speech engine, a modern text-to-speech engine, or a recorded human voice. In most respects, those who learned from the modern text-to-speech engine were not statistically different in regards to their perceptions, learning outcomes, or cognitive efficiency measures compared to those who learned from the recorded human voice. Our results imply that software technologies may have reached a point where they can credibly and effectively deliver the narration for multimedia learning environments.

Authors

• Scotty D. Craig, Arizona State University

• Noah L. Schroeder, Wright State University

• Joshua Chin, Arizona State University

• Jennifer Williams, Arizona State University