Beep Beep: Building Trust with Sound

Matthias Schmidmaier, Dominik Runge und Heinrich Hußmann

the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing System,

2020

Zusammenfassung

Audio is one modality that besides content transmission offers non-verbal cues that influence emotional perception. This allows to increase trust for example in privacy-sensitive systems like digital assistants. In this work we focus on basic audio feedback and explore how parameters like melody, pitch or tempo influence the creation of trust. We refer to related research in trust perception of voice, and evaluate if the derived concepts can be universally applied to simple sound patterns. Our study (n=39) shows significant effects for melody and mode, while tendencies were found for pitch and individual user preferences. We consider our findings to serve as basis for research towards the design of unobtrusive and trustworthy user experiences.