Recent posts

I’m thrilled that my paper with Georgia Zellou and Bruno Ferenc Segedin has been accepted to the Journal of Phonetics!

The paper examines acoustic-phonetic adjustments when people talk to a Siri vs. a naturally recorded human voice. We find prosodic differences (e.g., increased intensity, smaller f0 range in Siri-DS) as well as some targeted adjustments (vowel hyperarticulation in response to an error made by Siri). Across two experiments varying in error rate, we see differences in the way these register adaptions emerge.

I’m excited to be a keynote speaker at FRIAS Junior Researcher Conference – Human Perspectives on Spoken Human-Machine Interaction this November!

• If you’re interested in submitting a paper to the conference, note the due date of September 3, 2021

Check out my latest Frontiers paper with Georgia Zellou: Prosodic differences in human- and Alexa-directed speech, but similar local intelligibility adjustments

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.675704/

I am thrilled to be awarded an ‘Honorable Mention’ for the 2021 UC Davis Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (Postdoc/Grad student category). Congrats to all undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty honored in the ceremony.

https://urc.ucdavis.edu/chancellors-award-excellence-undergraduate-research

I’m excited that, along with co-authors Georgia Zellou and Tyler Kline, our paper, “The Influence of Conversational Role on Phonetic Alignment toward Voice-AI and Human Interlocutors” has been accepted to Language, Cognition and Neuroscience!

[Update: published May 21st: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1931372]

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!

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‘.

Yesterday, I was thrilled to be awarded the UC Davis Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research!

Congratulations Dr. Michelle Cohn for winning the Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research. Announced by the Associate Dean Dr. Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor at the 6th Annual Postdoctoral Research Symposium of @ucdavis PSA.@UCDavisGrad
@UCDGradPostdoc@waleos pic.twitter.com/u24SmnWeHp

— UC Davis Postdocs (@UCDavisPostdocs) March 31, 2021

Come learn about an interdisciplinary research project exploring how adults and kids talk to Amazon’s Alexa, compared to how they talk to a human. You’ll see an example of the experiment, meet the team, and get a behind-the-scenes look at the research process!

Interested in participating? http://phonlab.ucdavis.edu/participate

Today, UC Davis published a press release and we did an interview with CBS-13 Sacramento on our project, Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, smiled, and clear speech.

My co-authors, Anne Pycha (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Georgia Zellou (UC Davis), and I had a blast working together on a new project: how wearing a fabric face mask (as is common these days) affects speech intelligibility.

[Take away: masks don’t simply reduce intelligibility! The speaker plays an important role]

Click here to read the paper in ‘Cognition’

https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/02/02/uc-davis-study-adapting-face-masks/

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/speaking-and-listening-seem-more-difficult-masked-world-people-are-adapting