Swiss Spotlight on York Research
Posted on 5 December 2017
Members of the PoTS research group invited to speak at Zurich workshop.
Above: Dom and James pictured with Prof. Volker Dellwo, organiser of the workshop
James Tompkinson and Dom Watt, two of the members of the department's 'Phonetics of Threat Speech' (PoTS) group, were invited to speak at a one-day colloquium 'Speaker Individuality in Voice: Human and Machine Processing' organised by the Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. James's talk, 'Challenges in the elicitation of meaningful vocal information from linguistically untrained listeners', dealt with his research on voice description, which has the long-term goal of improving the way in which police officers and security personnel can gather useful information from earwitnesses to crimes and threatened offences (e.g. bomb threats). Dom's talk, 'Watch out, voice thieves about! The implications of vocal impersonation as a form of identity theft' focussed on attempts to deceive human and machine listeners using impersonated speech produced by human mimics and by the latest generation of voice-cloning software.
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