Tootfinder

Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Factor in Computer Voice
Yuto Mandai, Katie Seaborn, Tomoyasu Nakano, Xin Sun, Yijia Wang, Jun Kato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06235

Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Factor in Computer Voice
"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand N = 512) with…

Inter(sectional) Alia(s): Ambiguity in Voice Agent Identity via Intersectional Japanese Self-Referents
Takao Fujii, Katie Seaborn, Madeleine Steeds, Jun Kato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01998

Inter(sectional) Alia(s): Ambiguity in Voice Agent Identity via Intersectional Japanese Self-Referents
Conversational agents that mimic people have raised questions about the ethics of anthropomorphizing machines with human social identity cues. Critics have also questioned assumptions of identity neutrality in humanlike agents. Recent work has revealed that intersectional Japanese pronouns can elicit complex and sometimes evasive impressions of agent identity. Yet, the role of other "neutral" non-pronominal self-referents (NPSR) and voice as a socially expressive medium remains unexplored. In a…