Applied Phonology: Evaluating Voice Assistants

Course Description

Have you ever been curious about why Voice Assistants (Siri, Amazon Echo and Google Assistant) sometimes struggle to understand your English accent? As linguists, we can play a crucial role in evaluating these sophisticated systems.

In this class, you will assess these voice assistants by evaluating them against your own recorded speech. We will start by using the recording lab to record your voice and create a dataset. We will then use the voice assistants over this dataset. Once we know the possible errors from these systems, we will find the source of the errors using phonological analysis.

Throughout the course, you will gain the knowledge in the following areas:

• Techniques of making recordings in a laboratory setting
• Dealing with audios
• Evaluating voice assistants with your own voice
• Finding the source of the error using phonological analysis