Blog

November 7, 2024

Disparities in Whisper’s Automatic Speech Recognition Performance on Disfluent Speech

By Charan Sridhar (Research & Engineering Intern at AImpower.org) Introduction to Speech to Text Software Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies are something most of us take for granted. These technologies process spoken language and convert it into written text, and most of us use them nearly every day through tools […]
September 9, 2024

InterSpeech ’24 trip report and reflections

By Shaomei Wu Given that we are now deep in the space of speech AI technology, I attended InterSpeech 2024 conference for the first time last week at Kos Island, Greece. It was an eye-opening experience, I enjoyed meeting researchers and practioners interested in fair speech AI in person – […]
May 20, 2024

CHI 2024 Trip Report

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is one of the biggest, most renowned research conference on Human Computer Interactions – and, according to the president of ACM during the conference opening speech, “the only ACM conference that includes 'human’ in it’s name”. As we study and […]
March 25, 2024

AImpower.org’s Second Year in Review

AImpower.org was founded on a fundamental belief that marginalized communities – underserved and underrepresented by technologies – have the authority and the rights to take charge of their own technological experiences. As a tech nonprofit, our role is to amplify their authority and rights, co-creating fair and equitable technologies for, […]
March 13, 2024

Co-design Inclusive and Empathetic Videoconferencing Experience with People Who Stutter

Challenges with videoconferencing In this post-pandemic era, videoconferencing has become a prominent medium of communication in both our professional and personal lives. This shift, while bringing many conveniences, also introduces a set of challenges such as reduced non-verbal cues, turn-taking confusion, distractions, and heightened self-consciousness which can lead to “Zoom […]
February 20, 2024

Science without Walls – AImpower’s presentation at AAAS 2024 Annual Meeting

By Shaomei Wu I was very excited to speak at American Association for Advancements in Science’s Annual Meeting last week in Denver, with the support and sponsorship from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). This year’s meeting theme is “Science without Walls”, which aligns so well with AImpower.org’s mission to dismantle […]
October 20, 2023

Community-led Stuttered Speech Collection with StammerTalk

By sharing our experience and findings from StammerTalk’s stuttered speech collection project, we advocate for a new AI data paradigm of community data stewardship, especially for data from and about marginalized communities.
September 22, 2023

Inclusive virtual conferencing: Creating personal and empathetic experiences 

As we enter the era of remote and hybrid work, videoconferencing has become an essential for today's workplace. While telecommunication technologies are often optimized for efficiency and productivity, the emotional experience of communication is often under supported. At AImpower, we work with the stuttering community to investigate and re-invent videoconferencing technologies to promote an inclusive and empowering virtual meeting experience, that fosters empathy, authenticity, a sense of belonging, and emotional connections. Ran, our head of product, shares some insights into our journey of developing products that enhance virtual conferencing experiences for individuals with diverse speaking abilities.
September 13, 2023

Lost in Translation

Dyslexia is a neurodivergence that impacts one’s ability to process and produce textual information. While previous research has identified unique patterns in the writings of people with dyslexia – such as letter swapping and homophone confusion – that deviant themselves from the text typically used in the training and evaluation […]