ASRU 2025 (December 6-10, 2025) 🌺

Under the motto Towards the New Era of Speech Understanding, this year’s IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) Workshop brought researchers together in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. 🏝️

Together with Suyoun Kim (Amazon, USA), we had the exciting role of Student and Volunteer Chairs for the workshop. We had the pleasure of working with a group of highly motivated students from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, who helped us make sure the workshop ran seamlessly. On top of that, we organized a mentoring program, bringing together early-career researchers and experienced mentors. Mentees shared that the meet-ups gave them valuable clarity on research directions and career paths, while mentors enjoyed fresh perspectives from the next generation of researchers. Some impressions from these meet-ups are shared below.

It was fantastic working alongside the tireless General Chairs, Bowon Lee (Inha University, Korea), Kyu Han (Oracle, USA), and Chanwoo Kim (Korea University), whose dedication made the conference a success! Mahalo! 💛 💛 💛

New study! 🎉 How visuals shape the way we perceive voice assistant gender

Most voice assistants still sound female – even when designed to be neutral? 🤔

In our new study, The Influence of Visual Context on the Perception of Voice Assistant Gender, we explored how people perceive Apple Siri’s gender-neutral voice Quinn. We found that listeners tended to rate Quinn as more female-sounding – especially when a female portrait was shown at the same time (see Figure 1a). This confirms that what we see 👀 can strongly influence what we hear 👂, even if it is unrelated to the task at hand.

Designing truly gender-neutral voice assistants isn’t just about the sound itself — our expectations and the visual context play a powerful role too.

We had the pleasure of presenting this work at P&P 2024 in Halle, Germany. Read the full paper in the proceedings (pp. 55-63). #openaccess 🔓

P&P 2025 (October 6-7, 2025)

This year’s P&P conference took place at the beautiful Leipzig University Library, Bibliotheca Albertina. A great opportunity to discuss our work on Question Intonation in Bilingual Speakers of Bulgarian and Judeo-Spanish with the vibrant community of phoneticians and phonologists from the DACH+ region.

New study! 🎉 How personality shapes speech adaptation

I am delighted to share that our article Exploring the Relationship Between Mental Boundary Strength and Phonetic Accommodation is now published in Language and Speech. 🥂 🍾 The article is available online. #openaccess 🔓

📖 In this study, we explore whether individuals with thinner mental boundaries are more likely to phonetically adapt to their conversation partners. Our results suggest that speakers may accommodate to different types of phonetic features depending on their personality structure.

👀 We look forward to further research investigating how individual personality differences influence accommodation behaviour — for example, using the German Boundary Questionnaire version we provided.

Starting new position 🚀

After three fabulous years with ADAPT in Dublin 💚, I am happy to share that I am starting a new postdoc position at Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) Mainz and Saarland University, Saarbrücken. I will investigate the intonational phonology of Judeo-Spanish varieties spoken in Bulgaria 🇧🇬 with Prof. Christoph Gabriel, Prof. Bistra Andreeva, and Prof. Jonas Grünke.

Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, is a heritage language spoken by the descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled in 1492 from the Iberian Peninsula. One main area of settlement was the Ottoman Empire and its successor states such as Turkey, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Today, fewer than 30 Sephardim living in Bulgaria can still be considered native speakers of Bulgarian Judeo‑Spanish, making this research project an essential endeavor to preserve this important cultural heritage.