Text-to-Speech Software and Learning: Investigating the Relevancy of the Voice Effect

Technology advances quickly in today’s society. This is particularly true in regard to instructional multimedia. One increasingly important aspect of instructional multimedia design is determining the type of voice that will provide the narration; however, research in the area is dated and limited in scope. Using a randomized pretest–posttest design, we examined the efficacy of learning from an instructional animation where narration was provided by an older text-to-speech engine, a modern text-to-speech engine, or a recorded human voice. In most respects, those who learned from the modern text-to-speech engine were not statistically different in regard to their perceptions, learning outcomes, or cognitive efficiency measures compared with those who learned from the recorded human voice. Our results imply that software technologies may have reached a point where they can credibly and effectively deliver the narration for multimedia learning environments.