Dissertation submitted! 😄

GAM Workshop (May 10-14, 2021)

In the context of STEP 2021 (Spring Training in Experimental Psycholinguistics) organized by the Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton/Canada, I had the pleasure to participate in the workshop on data analysis with the generalized additive model (GAM) held by Harald Baayen, Yu-Ying Chuang (both University of Tübingen), and Peter Hendrix (Tilburg University).

This was an excellent introduction to the topic, which fortunately even used examples from Phonetics. Terrific! 💯 Thank you very much!

Selfie during STEP 2021: in the lobby @ gatherTown

Announcing Speech Pitch 🗣

Speech Pitch is ISCA-SAC's [1] new podcast. Throughout the episodes, we will interview different guests, mostly from the speech community, in an informal setting. We want to get to know their work, their stories and their ideas for the future. This podcast is hosted by PhD students in speech, with no experience in podcasts, but with the hope that it can bring the students and the entire speech community closer together, especially in pandemic times where we lack presencial conferences and other social interactions. We will try to have a new episode every 2 or 3 months. We hope you enjoy listening to it, and stay tuned!

[1] Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association

…and I had the honor to be the featured guest on the first episode of Speech Pitch. Many thanks to the hosts Catarina Botelho and Francisco Teixeira for making this such a pleasant experience! 👏

JPhon article published! 🎉

We are happy to announce that our article Phonetic accommodation in interaction with a virtual language learning tutor: A Wizard-of-Oz study was published in Journal of Phonetics and is available online. 📖 #openaccess 🔓

The article investigates phonetic accommodation of German native speakers in interaction with the simulated spoken dialog system Mirabella. Two versions of Mirabella are compared: one uses pre-recorded speech and the other synthesized speech. In both conditions, speakers converge to Mirabella regarding the intonation of wh-questions and one of two investigated allophonic contrasts.

ESSV (March 3-5, 2021)

The 32th Konferenz Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung (ESSV) was organized by Stefan Hillmann, Benjamin Weiss, Thilo Michael, Sebastian Möller, and their team at Technische Universität Berlin. It took place virtually, of course. We should think about awarding a prize for the most well-designed gatherTown environment - ESSV 2021 would be a strong contender! 🏆

I particularly enjoyed the keynote talks by Elisabeth André (Towards socially interactive agents with explanatory skills) and David Schlangen (All interaction is situated, all language is grounded: implications for the design of spoken dialogue systems).

The Best Student Paper went to Anabell Hacker (TU Berlin) for her work Alexa, who are you? – Analysing Alexa’s, Cortana’s and Siri’s vocal personality. Congrats – great work! 👏

We presented joint work between Saarland University, Saarbrücken and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań on Phonetic convergence evaluation based on fundamental frequency variability.

Selfie during ESSV 2021: next to Telefunken-Hochhaus @ gatherTown