On the development of an automatic voice pleasantness classification and intensity estimation system

In the last few years, the number of systems and devices that use voice based interaction has grown significantly. For a continued se of these systems, the interface must be reliable and pleasant in order to provide an optimal user experience. However there are urrently very few studies that try to evaluate how pleasant is a voice from a perceptual point of view when the final application s a speech based interface. In this paper we present an objective definition for voice pleasantness based on the composition of a epresentative feature subset and a new automatic voice pleasantness classification and intensity estimation system. Our study is ased on a database composed by European Portuguese female voices but the methodology can be extended to male voices or to ther languages. In the objective performance evaluation the system achieved a 9.1% error rate for voice pleasantness classification nd a 15.7% error rate for voice pleasantness intensity estimation. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.