Hello!

I’m a speech scientist at UC Davis. [bio]

My postdoctoral research investigates how individuals engage with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.

My central research question is whether speech communication with voice-AI is similar or different from speech communication with humans.

NSF Postdoc Fellowship

I am thrilled to be a PI on a two-year NSF-funded grant with Dr. Georgia Zellou (Linguistics), Dr. Zhou Yu (Computer Science), and Dr. Katharine Graf Estes (Psychology) to explore human-voice AI interaction. 

(You can reach more about the project here!)

Voice-AI

How do we talk to Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant? How do we perceive speech produced by voice-AI? …read more!

Music/Speech

Is individual variation in speech perception shaped by a person’s musical experience? …read more!

CA English

How does regional dialect variation shape speech production & perception? …read more!

UC Davis Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Research Group

In 2020, I launched the UC Davis HCI Research Group: a collective of faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates across campus interested in the dynamics of human-computer interaction. Our goal is to form a broader community of scientists, where we can share our work and forge connections across disciplines.

Click here to go to the HCI Research Group website!

Hao-Chuan Wang will present January 25th from 12-1pm

News!

New JASA paper on TTS speech perception!

I’m happy to announce that my paper with co-authors Georgia Zellou and Aleese Block, “Partial compensation for coarticulatory vowel nasalization across concatenative and neural text-to-speech” has been accepted for publication to the Journal of the Acoustic Society of America (JASA) today!

by Michelle Cohn

New Frontiers socialbot paper!

We are thrilled that our paper, Speech rate adjustments in conversations with an Amazon Alexa socialbot, has been accepted to Frontiers in Communication, in the special issue ‘Towards Omnipresent and Smart Speech Assistants‘.

by Michelle Cohn

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Selected Talks

5 Minute Linguist competition at the 2019 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) annual meeting.  (2:30 John McWhorter introduction, Talk 3:23-7:31).
2020 Cognitive Science Society Virtual Talk
Interspeech 2020 Virtual Talk

Publications

Cohn, M., & Zellou, G. (Accepted). Prosodic differences in human- and Alexa-directed speech, but similar error correction strategies. Frontiers in Communication. [Article]

Cohn, M., Liang, K., Sarian, M., Zellou, G., & Yu, Z. (2021). Speech rate adjustments in conversations with an Amazon Alexa socialbot. Frontiers in Communication 6, 671429. [Article]

Zellou, G., Cohn, M., & Kline, T. (2021). The Influence of Conversational Role on Phonetic Alignment toward Voice-AI and Human Interlocutors. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1-15. [Article]

Zellou, G., Cohn, M., Block, A. (2021). Partial compensation for coarticulatory vowel nasalization across concatenative and neural text-to-speech. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 149(5), 3424-3436. [Article]

Cohn, M., Pycha, A., Zellou, G. (2021). Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, smiled, and clear speech. Cognition 210, 104570. [Article]

Zellou, G., Cohn, M., Ferenc Segedin, B. (2021). Age- and gender-related differences in speech alignment toward humans and voice-AI. Frontiers in Communication 5, 600361. [Article]

Cohn, M. & Zellou, G. (2020). Perception of concatenative vs. Neural text-to-speech (TTS): Differences in intelligibility in noise and language attitudes. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 1773-1737. [pdf] [Virtual Talk]

Cohn, M., Raveh, E., Predeck, K., Gessinger, I., Möbius, B., & Zellou, G. (2020). Differences in Gradient Emotion Perception: Human vs. Alexa Voices. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 1818-1822. [pdf] [Virtual talk]

Zellou, G., & Cohn, M. (2020). Social and functional pressures in vocal alignment: Differences for human and voice-AI interlocutors. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 1634-1638. [pdf]

Cohn, M, Sarian, M., Predeck, K., & Zellou, G. (2020). Individual variation in language attitudes toward voice-AI: The role of listeners’ autistic-like traits. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 1813-1817. [pdf] [Virtual talk]

Cohn, M., Jonell, P., Kim, T., Beskow, J., Zellou, G. (2020). Embodiment and gender interact in alignment to TTS voices. 2020 Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, 220-226. [pdf] [Virtual talk]

Zellou, G., & Cohn, M. (2020). Top-down effects of apparent humanness on vocal alignment toward human and device interlocutors. 2020 Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, 3490-3496. [pdf]

Zellou, G., Cohn, M., Block, A. (2020). Top-down effect of speaker age guise on perceptual compensation for coarticulatory /u/-fronting. 2020 Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, 3483-3489. [pdf]

Yu, D., Cohn, M., Yang, Y.M., Chen, C., … Yu, Z. (2019). Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations. 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). [pdf]
Click here for the system demonstration

Cohn, M., Chen, C., & Yu, Z. (2019). A Large-Scale User Study of an Alexa Prize Chatbot: Effect of TTS Dynamism on Perceived Quality of Social Dialog. Proceedings of the 2019 Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial), 293-306. Stockholm, Sweden. [pdf]

Cohn, M., & Zellou, G. (2019). Expressiveness influences human vocal alignment toward voice-AI. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 41-45. Graz, Austria. [pdf]

Snyder, C. Cohn, M., Zellou, G. (2019). Individual variation in cognitive processing style predicts differences in phonetic imitation of device and human voices. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 116-120. Graz, Austria. [pdf]

Ferenc Segedin, B. Cohn, M., Zellou, G. (2019). Perceptual adaptation to device and human voices:  learning and generalization of a phonetic shift across real and voice-AI talkers. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2310-2314. Graz, Austria.[pdf]

Cohn, M., Zellou, G., Barreda, S. (2019). The role of musical experience in the perceptual weighting of acoustic cues for the obstruent coda voicing contrast in American English. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2250-2254. Graz, Austria. [pdf]

Cohn, M., Ferenc Segedin, B., Zellou, G. (2019). Imitating Siri: Socially-mediated vocal alignment to device and human voices. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), 1813-1817. Melbourne, Australia. [pdf]

Brotherton, C., Cohn, M., Zellou, G., Barreda, S. (2019). Sub-regional variation in positioning and degree of nasalization of /æ/ allophones in California. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), 2373-2377. Melbourne, Australia. [pdf]

Cohn, M. (2018).Investigating a possible “musician advantage” for speech-in-speech perception: The role of f0 separation. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 3(1), 24:1-9. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4311.  [pdf]

In revision / under review

Cohn, M., Ferenc Segedin, B., & Zellou, G. (Under review). The acoustic-phonetic properties of voice-AI- and human-DS: Differences by error type and rate.

Cohn, M., Predeck, K., Sarian, M., Zellou, G. (Under review). Prosodic alignment toward neutral and emotionally expressive speech interjections: Differences for human and device voices.

Public Outreach