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.
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Recommended citation: Alice Ross, Nina Markl, Catherine Lai, and Lauren A. Hall-Lew. 2026. The Sound of Silencing: Identities and Ideologies in Commercial Text-To-Speech. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 665, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3798657
Recommended citation: Alice Ross, Nina Markl, Catherine Lai, and Lauren A. Hall-Lew. 2026. The Sound of Silencing: Identities and Ideologies in Commercial Text-To-Speech. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 665, 1–6.
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