Applied Phonology: Evaluating Voice Assistants

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

BN and AP options
BN: Active participation and finishing assignments.
AP: Documentation of the work you have done in the class. As you progress through the course, there will be writing tasks that summarize the work you have done in the previous session(s). Using the assignment feedback, you can draft the relevant sections of your term paper.

For an overview on German phonology:
Wiese, R. (1996). The Phonology of German. Oxford University Press.
Other literature will be made available as we go along

Anglistics students: Finished Basic and Intermediate modules "Sprachwissenschaft"
Linguistics students: Completed basic module "Phonetik & Phonologie" (BB1 for Linguistik integrativ, BB1E for Ergänzungsfach)