Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Sexualised synthetic personas encode and amplify gendered power asymmetries through voice.

Published in Interspeech, 2026

Examining sexualised AI-generated English-speaking voices in a popular commercial platform from a Feminist HCI perspective, we find qualitative and quantitative differences in a diverse group of listeners’ reactions to male and female-coded voices, showing how social biases are reinforced through the voices’ conformity to a clichéd, heteronormative vocal attractiveness schema.

Recommended citation: Alice Ross, Ariadna Sanchez, Elin Kanhov, Catherine Lai, and Éva Székely. 2026. Sexualised synthetic personas encode and amplify gendered power asymmetries through voice. (accepted) Interspeech 2026
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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 and other positive traits.

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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Conveying gender through speech: insights from trans men.

Published in Interspeech, 2025

Focusing on the understudied population of trans men, we present one of the first studies on style shift in trans speakers, considering the phonetic features of trans men's speech in different contexts, and their own beliefs about vocal cues to gender perception.

Recommended citation: Alice Ross, Cliodhna Hughes, Eddie L. Ungless and Catherine Lai. (2025). 'Conveying gender through speech: insights from trans men.' Interspeech 2025, 674-678.
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Beyond the binary: Limitations and possibilities of gender-related speech technology research.

Published in IEEE SLT, 2024

This paper presents a review of 107 research papers relating to speech and sex or gender in ISCA Interspeech publications between 2013 and 2023. We note the scarcity of work on this topic and find that terminology, particularly the word gender, is used in ways that are underspecified and often out of step with the prevailing view in social sciences that gender is socially constructed and is a spectrum as opposed to a binary category.

Recommended citation: Ariadna Sanchez, Alice Ross, and Nina Markl (2024). 'Beyond the binary: Limitations and possibilities of gender-related speech technology research.' IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop 2024, 526-532.
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Is there an uncanny valley for speech? Investigating listeners’ evaluations of realistic TTS voices.

Published in Speech Prosody, 2024

In this paper, we aim to describe the relationship between synthesised voices' perceived human-likeness and pleasantness and seek evidence of auditory uncanny valley effects (UVE) in listeners' evaluations.

Recommended citation: Alice Ross, Martin Corley and Catherine Lai. (2024). 'Is there an uncanny valley for speech? Investigating listeners' evaluations of realistic TTS voices.' Speech Prosody 2024, 1115-1119.
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