Oliver Niebuhr, Associate Professor of Communication & Innovation, University of Southern Denmark, Founder of AllGoodSpeakers ApS, Head of the CIE Acoustics Lab, CIE

“Perception and quantification of acoustic charisma, i.e. a speaker’s persuasive power”

Charismatic and, thus, persuasive speaking is a traditional key topic of rhetoric, psychology, and management, but has hardly played any role so far in research and technology of spoken language. However, digitization, new globalized channels of communication, the promotion of entrepreneurial activities, and the social interaction between humans and robots have recently put the production and perception of speaker charisma also on the agenda of speech scientists. In the last 20 years, numerous studies have contributed to identifying the phonetic characteristics of charisma and understanding their interaction. The present talk briefly summarizes these characteristics and then proceeds with how they can affect the ratings and behavior of recipients. We look in particular at aspects of human-machine interaction, speaker gender and the agreement of phonetic findings with traditional claims of rhetorical guidebooks.