The Sound of Silencing: Identities and Ideologies in Commercial Text-To-Speech.
Published in ACM CHI, 2026
Drawing upon sociolinguistic theory, we carry out a novel experiment to investigate implicit ideological associations in a leading commercial TTS system, concluding that the system’s output disproportionately reproduces white, male, US-accented speech when prompted to convey competence.
Recommended citation: Alice Ross, Nina Markl, Catherine Lai, and Lauren Hall-Lew, (accepted). The Sound of Silencing: Identities and Ideologies in Commercial Text-To-Speech. CHI EA 26: Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Recommended citation: Alice Ross, Nina Markl, Catherine Lai, and Lauren Hall-Lew, (accepted). The Sound of Silencing: Identities and Ideologies in Commercial Text-To-Speech. CHI EA 26: Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Barcelona.
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