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"Who's talking" has long fascinated researchers. Our latest work, just published online in Neuropsychologia, shows that voice identity in human voices and their AI-cloned counterparts is processed in remarkably similar ways, as reflected in ERP responses to trained familiar vs. unfamiliar talkers. We also find that learning a speaker's name and later recognizing their voice elicits ERP patterns resembling those for intimately familiar people (e.g., family members), echoing Plante-Hébert et al. (2021). This points to a neat social trick: knowing someone's name can make a real difference when you're building a relationship with them!

AI voices are not stereotypically monotone, and neither are human voices. We introduced a pipeline to prepare and validate expressive human and AI voices that share comparable speaker identity. We also found that listeners are sensitive to AI-generated speech and do not readily accept that an AI voice shares the same identity as its human source, especially when speech prosody complicates the cognitive judgment. Our latest work, published in Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, is now available online.

It was a great pleasure to work with Prof. Jiang to present a poster at Leiden University for SP2024. Most importantly, we did a lot of interesting work to bid for hosting Speech Prosody 2026 in Shanghai. Although the host eventually went to Philadelphia, I found the experience exciting. We prepared a nice talk and organized a lucky draw event afterwards. We thank everyone we met at the conference! In the end, the vote was close — 80 for Shanghai, 128 for Philadelphia, and 15 with no preference (Source).

I'm very honored to have received a PhD offer to study at McGill University, starting in September 2024!