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On April 10th 1:30-2:30pm (PT), I’ll be giving a talk for the UC Davis Cluster on Language

Voice assistant- vs. human-directed? Speech style differences as a window to social cognition. 

Individuals of all ages increasingly use spoken language to interface with technology, such as with voice assistants (e.g., Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant). In this talk, I will present some of our recent research examining speech style adaptations in controlled psycholinguistic experiments with voice assistant and human addressees. Our findings suggest that both a priori expectations of communicative competence, as well as the actual error rate in the interaction, shape acoustic-phonetic adaptations. I discuss these findings in terms of the interplay of anthropomorphism and mental models in human-computer interaction, and raise the broader implications of voice technology on language use and language change.

I’m thrilled our multi-institutional project led by Stefano Coretta and Timo Roetteger (and with 151 co-authors) was accepted to Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science: “Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses”.

Today we had a new paper accepted to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA): “The perception of nasal coarticulatory variation in face-masked speech” (Zellou, Pycha, & Cohn, accepted).

I’m thrilled that, along with my co-authors Santiago Barreda & Georgia Zellou, we have a paper accepted to the Journal of Speech Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR): Differences in a musician’s advantage for speech-in-speech perception based on age and task.

• Full text (Researchgate)
• Published paper (JSLHR, ASHA)

Along with my co-authors, Santiago Barreda, Katharine Graf Estes, Zhou Yu, & Georgia Zellou, I’ll be presenting our research, Register adaptations toward Alexa: Comparing children and adults.

I’m excited to share that our paper, Cross-Cultural Comparison of Gradient Emotion Perception: Human vs. Alexa TTS Voices, was accepted to Interspeech 2022! This project is a collaboration with Iona Gessinger (project lead; UC Dublin), Bernd Moebius (Saarland University), and Georgia Zellou (UC Davis).

We’re excited that our paper, “Effects of Emotional Expressiveness on Voice Chatbot Interactions”, was accepted to the 2022 Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) conference. This project was led by UC Davis grad students, Qingxiaoyang Zhu and Austin Chau. Our other co-authors include Kai-Hui Liang, Georgia Zellou, Hao-Chuan Wang, & Zhou Yu.

We’re hosting a virtual event at the UC Davis Phonetics Lab (Dept. of Linguistics) on Thursday, April 28th.

https://hr.ucdavis.edu/departments/worklife-wellness/events/tocs

[Remote-activity].
Come learn about speech science with Siri, Alexa, and Google assistant! Kids (ages 7-12) can participate in a real science experiment with a voice assistant (note that a parent must be present to consent). You will need a computer that can play sound and allow you to type/click (no other devices are needed). The experiment will take about 5 minutes. After, you’ll see a short presentation about our research, including an overview of the lab.

Anne Pycha, Georgia Zellou, and I have a new paper on face-masked speech, in the Frontiers special issue on Language Development Behind the Mask.

Face-masked speech intelligibility: the influence of speaking style, visual information, and background noise

We have a new paper led by grad student, Nick Aoki, and co-authored by Dr. Georgia Zellou that was accepted to the Journal of Acoustical Society of America (JASA)- Express Letters on April 1st!

“The clear speech intelligibility benefit for text-to-speech voices: Effects of speaking style and visual guise”