When Kamala Harris speaks, Nicole Holliday hears her multicultural background and distinctly California roots. When a voice assistant answers a question, Holliday hears a set of choices engineered to sound human enough to trust.
Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics, studies the social information carried in speech: the subtle cues of region, age, race and gender that listeners decode automatically, often without knowing they’re doing it. Her work has taken on new stakes as AI-generated voices move into everyday life, raising questions about what it means when the thing talking to us isn’t a person at all.
After Office Hours is a new UC Berkeley News series where faculty explain, in their own words, the “aha” moments powering their research. Holliday, our first faculty member featured, talked with us about how she explains her work at a dinner party, what changed her thinking and what she wants Californians to know about the public value of basic science.