A Study on Speech Emotion Recognition in the Context of Voice User Experience

With the increasing popularity of voice user interfaces (VUIs), there is a growing interest in the evaluation of not only their usability, but also the quality of the user experience (UX). Previous research has shown that UX evaluation in human-machine interaction is significantly influenced by emotions. As a consequence, the measurement of emotions through the user’s speech signal may enable a better measure of the voice user experience and thus allow for the optimization of human-computer interaction through VUIs. With our study, we want to contribute to the research on speech emotion recognition in the context of voice user experience. We recorded 45 German participants while they were interacting with a voice assistant in a Wizard-of-Oz scenario. The interactions contained some typical user annoyances that might occur in voice-based human-computer interaction. Three analysis modules provided insight into the voice user experience of our participants: (1) a UX-questionnaire; (2) the UEQ+ scales for voice assistants; (3) speech emotion recognition with OpenVokaturi.