The Manipulative Power of Voice Characteristics: Investigating Deceptive Patterns in Mandarin Chinese Female Synthetic Speech

Pervasive voice interaction enables deceptive patterns through subtle voice characteristics, yet empirical investigation into this manipulation lags behind, especially within major non-English language contexts. Addressing this gap, our study presents the first systematic investigation into voice characteristic-based dark patterns employing female synthetic voices in Mandarin Chinese. This focus is crucial given the prevalence of female personas in commercial assistants and the prosodic significance in the Chinese language. Guided by the conceptual framework identifying key influencing factors, we systematically evaluate effectiveness variations by manipulating voice characteristics (five characteristics, three intensities) across different scenarios (shopping vs. question-answering) with different commercial aims. A preliminary study (N=24) validated the experimental materials and the main study (N=36) revealed significant behavioral manipulation (up to +2027.6%). Crucially, the analysis showed that effectiveness varied significantly with voice characteristics and scenario, mediated by user perception (of tone, intonation, timbre) and user demographics (individual preferences, though limited demographic impact). These interconnected findings offer evidence-based insights for ethical design.