Recent posts

We are thrilled to have several papers accepted to the 2020 Interspeech conference:

• Cohn, M., & Zellou, G. “Perception of concatenative vs. neural text-to-speech (TTS): Differences in intelligibility in noise and language attitudes”
• Cohn, M., Sarian, M., Predeck, K., & Zellou, G. “Individual variation in language attitudes toward voice-AI: The role of listeners’ autistic-like traits”
• Zellou, G., & Cohn, M. “Social and functional pressures in vocal alignment: Differences for human and voice-AI interlocutors”

Including one for the new collaboration between UC Davis and Saarland University:

• Cohn, M., Raveh, E., Predeck, K., Gessinger, I., Möbius, B., Zellou, G. “Differences in Gradient Emotion Perception: Human vs. Alexa Voices”

Embodiment and gender interact in alignment to TTS voices (CogSci 2020)

UC Davis-KTH Collaboration:

Michelle Cohn (UCD), Patrik Jonell (KTH), Taylor Kim (UCD), Jonas Beskow (KTH), Georgia Zellou (UCD)

We are thrilled that three of our papers have been accepted to the 2020 Cognitive Science Society Meeting!

• Cohn, M., Jonell, P., Kim, T., Beskow, J., Zellou, G. Embodiment and gender interact in alignment to TTS voices.

• Zellou, G., & Cohn, M. Top-down effects of apparent humanness on vocal alignment toward human and device interlocutors.

• Zellou, G., Cohn, M., Block, A. Top-down effect of speaker age guise on perceptual compensation for coarticulatory /u/-fronting.

This year’s Picnic Day is going 100% digital in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, a small team of talented RAs (Patty Sandoval, Julian Rambob, Mia Gong, and Marlene Andrade) helped me create Virtual Booth videos!

See the other Virtual Picnic Day events here!

We’ll present two projects at the annual Linguistic Society of America (LSA) meeting in January:

• California listeners’ patterns of partial compensation for coarticulatory /u/-fronting is influenced by the apparent age of the speaker (Aleese Block, Michelle Cohn, Georgia Zellou)
  

• Conversational role influences speech alignment toward digital assistant and human voices (Georgia Zellou, Michelle Cohn, Tyler Kline, Bruno Ferenc Segedin)

Congrats to the Gunrock team, led by Prof. Zhou Yu, for our demo paper acceptance at the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Hong Kong!

Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations
Dian Yu, Michelle Cohn, Yi Mang Yang, Chun Yen Chen, Weiming Wen, Jiaping Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Kevin Jesse, Austin Chau, Antara Bhowmick, Shreenath Iyer, Giritheja Sreenivasulu, Sam Davidson, Ashwin Bhandare and Zhou Yu [pdf]

You can see our system demonstration (2 minute video):

Great job to Tyler Kline and Aleese Block who presented two of our projects at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP3) this weekend at UC Santa Cruz!
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• Speech Alignment of Females toward Voice-AI and Human Voices: Conversational Role Influences Phonetic Imitation in a Map Task (Tyler Kline, Bruno Ferenc Segedin, Michelle Cohn & Georgia Zellou) 

• California listeners’ patterns of partial compensation for coarticulatory /u/-fronting is influenced by the apparent age of the speaker (Aleese Block, Michelle Cohn & Georgia Zellou)

Along with Georgia Zellou & Bruno Ferenc Segedin (UC Davis Phonetics Lab), I traveled to Graz, Austria to present some of our research at the 2019 Interspeech Conference!

See below for links for the papers: 

• Cathryn Snyder, Michelle Cohn, & Georgia Zellou (2019). Individual variation in cognitive processing style predicts differences in phonetic imitation of device and human voices.
• Michelle Cohn & Georgia Zellou (2019). Expressiveness influences human vocal alignment toward voice-AI.
• Bruno Ferenc Segedin, Michelle Cohn, & Georgia Zellou. (2019). Perceptual adaptation to device and human voices:  learning and generalization of a phonetic shift across real and voice-AI talkers.
• Michelle Cohn, Georgia Zellou, Santiago Barreda. (2019) The role of musical experience in the perceptual weighting of acoustic cues for the obstruent coda voicing contrast in American English. 

While at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden) this September, Michelle Cohn met up with Dr. Jonas Beskow, co-founder of Furhat Robotics, and Ph.D. student Patrik Jonell. Together with Georgia Zellou, they are conducting a study to test the role of embodiment and gender in human’s voice-AI interaction with three platforms: Amazon Echo, Nao, and Furhat. 

Along with Dr. Zhou Yu and Arbit Chen (UCD Computer Science), we are thrilled that we have a paper accepted to the Special Interest Group on Discourse (SIGDIAL) meeting in Stockholm, Sweden.

Our paper explores how different text-to-speech (TTS) modifications to the 2018 Alexa Prize Winner chatbot, Gunrock, impact user ratings.

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. (In press). 2019 Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, SIGDIAL.