Mind the voice! The effect of service robot voice vividness on service failure tolerance

Voice of service robot has significant impact on human-robot interaction,but with inadequate academic attention to it in robot service failure context. This research focuses on a novel perceptual nonlinguistic tone of robot voice, vividness, and investigates its influence on consumer tolerance to robot service failure. In three experiments, it was found that voice vividness negatively influences consumer tolerance to service failure, with service expectation playing a mediating role. Furthermore, the study revealed that robot appearance cuteness can mitigate the detrimental impact of voice vividness, but this mitigating effect is only effective in scenarios with low service failure severity.