Speech, Voice, Accents and AI Free Thinking

Published: March 4, 2021, 10:44 p.m.

From prejudice against accents to early attempts to create an artificial voice - Matthew Sweet is joined by the academics Sadie Ryan, Allison Koenecke and Lynda Clark.

Sadie Ryan hosts a podcast Accentricity and is part of the Manchester Voices project team https://www.manchestervoices.org/project-team/\nYou can find a New Thinking podcast episode looking in more detail at that project https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07h30hm

Lynda Clark is part of the InGAME (Innovation in Games and Media Enterprise) project at the University of Dundee. She's interested in interactive fiction and AI storytelling. She's been researching the experiments of Joseph Faber who created Euphonia in 1846 and created her own take working with games and digital experiences.

Allison Koenecke works in the Stanford University Computational Policy Lab and the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab

You might also be interested in these programmes from the Free Thinking archives - all available to download as BBC Arts & Ideas podcasts\nWhat is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3\nWhat is Good Listening? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000djtd\nThe pros and cons of swearing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09c0r4m\nLanguage and Belonging https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006fh9\nAI and creativity: what makes us human? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005nml\nRobots https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08chbpc

Producer: Luke Mulhall