Beyond Words: Predicting Preference Strength From Vocal Cues
Type
working paper
Date Issued
2025-09-22
Author(s)
Abstract
Consumers increasingly make purchase decisions through voice-enabled technologies, from shopping via smart speakers at home to AI-powered ordering kiosks at fast-food restaurants. In these interactions, consumers not only communicate their choices through what they say but also through how they sound when they say it. The current work reveals that so-called vocal paralinguistic cues, such as a person’s vocal tone and intonation, provide an unexplored window into consumers’ underlying states at the moment of a decision. Using gradient-boosted decision trees, we demonstrate that vocal paralinguistic cues reliably predict consumers’ preference strength and behaviorally relevant outcomes. We further demonstrate that the approach generalizes across a wide array of choice settings (from product preferences to beauty ratings). This research provides firms with a novel lens into consumers’ preferences and decision states at the point of purchase for firms. We also make our model publicly available for interested researchers and provide a dedicated Shiny app to use the model as a feature -extraction tool. We conclude by highlighting the theoretical and practical implications of our findings in an increasingly voice-first marketplace.
Language
English
Refereed
No
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Name
GaerthEtAl_2025_WP.pdf
Size
2.72 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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