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Advances in voice technology and voice user interfaces (VUIs) -- such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home -- have opened up the potential for many new types of interaction. However, despite the potential of these devices reflected by the…
Multichannel speech enhancement algorithms are essential for improving the intelligibility of speech signals in noisy environments. These algorithms are usually evaluated at the utterance level, but this approach overlooks the disparities…
Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly embedded in daily life, yet their ability to navigate user emotions efficiently is still evolving. This study investigates how users with varying traits -- gender, personality, and cultural…
Conversational systems use spoken language to interact with their users. Although conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming common and afford interesting functionalities, there is little known about the issues users of…
Voice-based systems like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, along with the growing popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, serve diverse populations, including visually impaired and low-literacy communities.…
In this thesis, we present a statistical language model for resolving speech repairs, intonational boundaries and discourse markers. Rather than finding the best word interpretation for an acoustic signal, we redefine the speech recognition…
Chatbots are one class of intelligent, conversational software agents activated by natural language input (which can be in the form of text, voice, or both). They provide conversational output in response, and if commanded, can sometimes…
Unpleasant social interactions on the road can negatively affect driving safety. At the same time, researchers have attempted to address social discomfort by exploring Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) as social mediators. Before…
In our multicultural world, affect-aware AI systems that support humans need the ability to perceive affect across variations in emotion expression patterns across cultures. These systems must perform well in cultural contexts without…
Achieving joint objectives by teams of cooperative planning agents requires significant coordination and communication efforts. For a single-agent system facing a plan failure in a dynamic environment, arguably, attempts to repair the…
Conversational speech often reveals early signs of cognitive decline, such as dementia and MCI. In the UK, one in four people belongs to an ethnic minority, and dementia prevalence is expected to rise most rapidly among Black and Asian…
The Internet enables users to access vast resources, but it can also expose users to harmful cyber-attacks. This paper investigates human factors issues concerning the use of sounds in a cyber-security domain. It describes a methodology,…
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the increase of conversational agents like Replika, designed to provide social interaction and emotional support. However, reports of these AI systems engaging in inappropriate sexual…
Access to non-verbal cues in social interactions is vital for people with visual impairment. It has been shown that non-verbal cues such as eye contact, number of people, their names and positions are helpful for individuals who are blind.…
The main motivation for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is efficient interfaces to computers, and for the interfaces to be natural and truly useful, it should provide coverage for a large group of users. The purpose of these tasks is to…
Large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled new AI-powered applications that help people with visual impairments (PVI) receive natural language descriptions of their surroundings through audible text. We investigated how this emerging…
In mobile speech communication applications, wind noise can lead to a severe reduction of speech quality and intelligibility. Since the performance of speech enhancement algorithms using acoustic microphones tends to substantially degrade…
The expanding influence of social media platforms over the past decade has impacted the way people communicate. The level of obscurity provided by social media and easy accessibility of the internet has facilitated the spread of hate…
Content moderation on social media platforms shapes the dynamics of online discourse, influencing whose voices are amplified and whose are suppressed. Recent studies have raised concerns about the fairness of content moderation practices,…
As artificial intelligence systems increasingly permeate processes of cultural and epistemic production, there are growing concerns about how their outputs may confine individuals and groups to static or restricted narratives about who or…