Linguists Versus 'AI' Speech Analysis (with Nicole Holliday), 2025.03.17
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Show Notes
Measuring your talk time? Counting your filler words? What about "analyzing" your "emotions"? Companies that push LLM technology to surveil and summarize video meetings are increasingly offering to (purportedly) analyze your participation and assign your speech some metrics, all in the name of "productivity". Sociolinguist Nicole Holliday joins Alex and Emily to take apart claims about these "AI" meeting feedback tools, and reveal them to be just sparkling bossware, with little insight into how we talk.
Nicole Holliday is Acting Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley.
Quick note: Our guest for this episode had some sound equipment issues, which unfortunately affected her audio quality.
Main course:
Read AI Review: This AI Reads Emotions During Video Calls
Zoom rebrands existing and introduces new generative AI features
Speech analysis startup releases AI tool that simulates difficult job interview conversation
Fresh AI Hell:
Amazon Echo will send all recordings to Amazon beginning March 28
Trump’s NIST no longer concerned with “safety” or “fairness”
Reporter Kevin Roose is feeling the bullshit
UW’s eScience institute pushing “AI” for information access
OpenAI whines about data being too expensive, with a side of Sinophobia
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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.