Spot the Pleasant People! Navigating the Cocktail Party Buzz

We present an experimental platform for making voice likability assessments that are decoupled from individual voices, and instead capture voice characteristics over groups of speakers. We employ methods that we have previously used for other purposes to create the Cocktail platform, where respondents navigate in a voice buzz made up of about 400 voices on a touch screen. They then choose the location where they find the voice buzz most pleasant. Since there is no image or message on the screen, the platform can be used by visually impaired people, who often need to rely on spoken text, on the same premises as seeing people. In this paper, we describe the platform and its motivation along with our analysis method. We conclude by presenting two experiments in which we verify that the platform behaves as expected: one simple sanity test, and one experiment with voices grouped according to their mean pitch variance.