Neuroscience research shows that using AI voices damages your listener engagement.
Have you noticed a creeping sense of unease when you listen to AI voices?
It might take a couple of seconds, maybe even a sentence or two, but if you’re an audio professional I’ll bet you’ll be feeling distinctly uncomfortable, and that feeling usually arrives just ahead of the realisation you’re listening to AI generated audio.
And now neuroscience suggests that we were right to trust our instincts.
Human brains react differently to AI voices
Putting to one side the ethics of using human voice talent over AI voices, research measuring blood flow within the brain shows that humans respond differently, even with sophisticated AI voices.
Doctoral researcher Christine Skjegstad and Professor Sascha Frühholz, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo, presented their findings in June at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2024.
The TL;DR version of their discovery is that human voices activated the brain areas associated with memory, emotional processing and empathy (the right hippocampus and right inferior frontal gyrus, if you’re a nerd like me), whereas AI voices prompted stronger responses in error detection and attention regulation areas (the right anterior mid cingulate cortex and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex).
And, it’s harder work for your listener
A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology looked specifically at how our brains process news presented by human versus AI voices.
Analysing participants’ brain activity while listening to newscasts, researchers found that human voices created significantly more cognitive engagement. Notably, the participants processed and retained information more effectively when listening to a human reporter than an AI-generated voice.
The study also suggested that listeners place greater trust in the credibility and fluency of a human voice. In other words, it’s not just that our brains notice the difference. It’s that they have to work harder, and with less success, when the voice is artificial.
We may not consciously know the difference, but our brains do
This is why you may have experienced that sense of unease, even when you can’t quite put your finger on why.
In fact, we’re surprisingly bad when it comes to correctly answering ‘human or AI’. Happy voices were easier to recognise – AI is unsettling when it strays beyond neutral – but the participants in the 2024 research only correctly identified human voices 56% of the time and AI voices 50.5% of the time.
So, given a choice between an audio message that’s memorable and relatable, and one that prompts the listener to be on high alert for mistakes and work harder to focus, which would you go for…?
Still not convinced? Read more about what your AI voice choice might be saying about your brand values.
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