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Participant
July 7, 2024
Question

Potential Racial and Gender Bias in Enhance Speech

  • July 7, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 400 views

Wanted to raise the issue that using Enhance Speech, while the ONLY tool in the arsenal that was able to remove some hideous mic/scratching noises caused by equipment from a recent lecture, had an undesired side effect of completely removing the _accents_ from the voices of our non-native English speakers.

Some other side effects:
1. Made our female speakers sound more demure/wary in tone.
2. Made some of our speakers sound robotic.

As such, we never used the Enhance speech above 10% in any of our talks except one and that talk is in review by the presenter to get their consent given how drastically it changed their voice.  

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1 reply

TeresaDemel
Community Manager
Community Manager
July 8, 2024

Hi Clint,

 

I will send you an email requesting samples of the audio so that we can do some testing. Thanks for bringing up the equity issues (women and people with accents) as this is very important to us.

 

Regarding robotic sounding voices, this is a known issue and our team is working on it. 

 

Teresa