Kathy Reid
Kathy Reid works at the intersection of open source, emerging technologies and the communities that bring them to life. She has twenty years' experience in development, developer and technical leadership and management roles across education and emerging technology.
She is currently with Mozilla's Voice team, and is doing a PhD with ANU's 3A Institute on how open voice technology goes to scale.
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Session
By 2025, there will be over 8 billion voice assistants in use. Speech recognition, chatbots, virtual assistants and smart speakers are all types of voice assistant. But as with many other technologies, issues of bias in the intent, design, execution and evolution of voice assistants are evident.
Many voice assistants today fail to accurately recognise speakers who have accents, or who speak lesser-known languages. Synthesised voices represent well known languages only. There are a range of reasons for this - the under-representation of minorities in technology, commercial drivers and under-resourced languages.This talk will take the audience on a tour of these issues, highlighting the open source efforts in the field that provide opportunities to redress this state of affairs.