Speaker
Description
The quality of audio transmission in video conferencing systems can influence not only speech perceptionbut also higher-level social judgments in communication contexts such as hiring decisions following jobinterviews. The present study investigated how degradations in speech quality affect perceived employability and whether objective audio quality models capture these effects.The audio streams of AI-generated job interview videos were manipulated to create three levels of audio quality (high, medium, low). Participants evaluated the employability of the speakers, while thecorresponding audio signals were analyzed using two objective audio quality models, ViSQOL and GPSMq.Results showed a clear effect of audio quality on employability ratings, with substantially lower ratings inthe low-quality condition compared to medium and high quality, and no significant difference betweenmedium and high quality. ViSQOL reflected these differences by assigning lower scores to degraded signals, whereas GPSMq showed limited sensitivity, including a floor effect in the medium-quality condition.Correlation analyses revealed only weak associationsbetween model outputs and employability ratings, indicating that current audio quality models capture only a limited portion of the variance in social judgments.Overall, the findings highlight that audio quality contributes to employability judgments in video confer-encing contexts, but does not fully account for them.