March 04, 2021

Speech, Voice, Accents and AI Free Thinking

44 minutes

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/

You 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

What is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3

What is Good Listening? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000djtd

The pros and cons of swearing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09c0r4m

Language and Belonging https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006fh9

AI and creativity: what makes us human? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005nml

Robots https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08chbpc

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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By BBC Radio 4

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