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Software Could Help You Sound More Trustworthy

posted by janrinok on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the sounds-good-to-me dept.

takyon writes:

Want to sound like someone people can trust? This new software could help

People can tell a lot by the sound of your voice—your mood, your hometown, and even whether you're a friend or an enemy. Now, a group of French researchers has figured out which vocal intonations make a person sound more trustworthy or competent, using a new computer program that can transform the pitch patterns of our voices.

First, the researchers built their own voice processing software, which they used to create hundreds of random intonations of a recording of the word "bonjour"—"hello" in French—by both male and female speakers. Then, they asked two groups of about 20 volunteers each to listen to about 700 pairs of recordings; they used their responses to reconstruct optimal pitch patterns for both trustworthiness and competence.

The team found that listeners clearly associated specific intonations with each social trait [open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1716090115] [DX], regardless of their own gender or that of the speaker, they reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:49PM (3 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:49PM (#662028) Journal

    I would rather have people who ARE actually trustworthy, than people who merely SOUND trustworthy.

    It's like salespeople trying to sound sincere.

    "Machines are trustworthy" -- Robot from 1960's Lost In Space, episode season 2, Kidnapped in Space

    --
    The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Virindi on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:08PM (2 children)

    by Virindi (3484) on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:08PM (#662037)

    Machines are only as trustworthy as the people who built them.

    And what those people will do, like most humans, depends on what they think they can get away with.

    Which is to say, machines are not very trustworthy at all.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:13PM (1 child)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 03 2018, @05:13PM (#662040) Journal

      The question is "trustworthy for who?"

      The machines are very trustworthy for the people who built them.

      The same machines might not be very trustworthy to the people who will be victimized by them.

      --
      The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.

      • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday April 04 2018, @03:36AM

        by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday April 04 2018, @03:36AM (#662324) Homepage

        The machines are very trustworthy for the people who built them.

        Bullshit.

        What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a memory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY

        https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf [usenix.org]

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