Public perceptions of speech technology trust in the United Kingdom

Speech technology is now pervasive throughout the world, impacting a variety of socio-technical use-cases. Speech technology is a broad term encompassing capabilities that translate, analyse, transcribe, generate, modify, enhance, or summarise human speech. Many of the technical features and the possibility of speech data misuse are not often revealed to the users of such systems. When combined with the rapid development of AI and the plethora of use-cases where speech-based AI systems are now being applied, the consequence is that researchers, regulators, designers and government policymakers still have little understanding of the public’s perception of speech technology. Our research explores the public’s perceptions of trust in speech technology by asking people about their experiences, awareness of their rights, their susceptibility to being harmed, their expected behaviour, and ethical choices governing behavioural responsibility. We adopt a multidisciplinary lens to our work, in order to present a fuller picture of the United Kingdom (UK) public perspective through a series of socio-technical scenarios in a large-scale survey. We analysed survey responses from 1,000 participants from the UK, where people from different walks of life were asked to reflect on existing, emerging, and hypothetical speech technologies. Our socio-technical scenarios are designed to provoke and stimulate debate and discussion on principles of trust, privacy, responsibility, fairness, and transparency. We found that gender is a statistically significant factor correlated to awareness of rights and trust. We also found that awareness of rights is statistically correlated to perceptions of trust and responsible use of speech technology. By understanding the notions of responsibility in behaviour and differing perspectives of trust, our work encapsulates the current state of public acceptance of speech technology in the UK. Such an understanding has the potential to affect how regulatory and policy frameworks are developed, how the UK invests in its AI research and development ecosystem, and how speech technology that is developed within the UK might be received by global stakeholders.