The Sound of Synthetic: A Scoping Review of Human Perception in Detecting Synthetic Voices

This scoping review synthesizes existing literature on how humans perceive and detect synthetic voices, emphasizing the auditory cues listeners rely on and the factors influencing their accuracy. By highlighting both the positive and negative implications of this technology, we analyze the studies with a focus on the misuse of synthetic voice. Research suggests that detection capabilities are often unreliable, with individuals relying on cues such as intuition/gut feeling, liveliness, emotions, linguistic features, and environmental features. This review examines how studies have explored these issues, analyzing human detection accuracy, detection cues, and empirical findings across human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence research. By mapping current research trends, this study identifies gaps in understanding human synthetic voice detection and proposes directions for future research.