'People don’t trust bad AI voices': listeners rated a Chinese startup's synthetic voices higher for trust and realism than those from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon

A new global study suggests people stop trusting AI voices the moment they realize the voice isn't human, which creates a big problem for companies that use synthetic voices in customer service and other public-facing systems.

The research was conducted by Estonian startup Vocal Image and examined 20 text-to-speech models from major technology companies and specialized AI developers.

Participants in the study, which involved more than 10,000 participants over the course of a month, listened to different voices and were asked to react to them. They could like, dislike, skip, or rate each voice. The listeners were not told in advance that they would be listening to AI-generated speech.

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