"I don't Think These Devices are Very Culturally Sensitive."-Impact of Automated Speech Recognition Errors on African Americans

How People Living With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Use Personalized Automatic Speech Recognition Technology to Support Communication

PURPOSE

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive, ultimately fatal disease causing progressive muscular weakness. Most people living with ALS (plwALS) experience dysarthria, eventually becoming unable to communicate using natural speech. Many wish to use speech for as long as possible. Personalized automated speech recognition (ASR) model technology, such as Google's Project Relate, is argued to better recognize speech with dysarthria, supporting maintenance of understanding through real-time captioning. The objectives of this study are how plwALS and communication partners use Relate in everyday conversation over a period of up to 12 months and how it may change with any decline in speech over time.

METHOD

This study videoed interactions between three plwALS and communication partners. We assessed ASR caption accuracy and how well they preserved meaning. Conversation analysis was used to identify participants' own organizational practices in the accomplishment of interaction. Thematic analysis was used to understand better the participants' experiences of using ASR captions.

RESULTS

All plwALS reported lower-than-expected ASR accuracy when used in conversation and felt ASR captioning was only useful in certain contexts. All participants liked the concept of live captioning and were hopeful that future improvements to ASR accuracy may support their communication in everyday life.

CONCLUSIONS

Training is needed on best practices for customization and practical use of ASR technology and for the limitations of ASR in conversational settings. Support is needed for those less confident with technology and to reduce misplaced allocation of ownership of captioning errors, risking negative effects on psychological well-being.

African American English speakers' pitch variation and rate adjustments for imagined technological and human addressees

This paper examines the adaptations African American English speakers make when imagining talking to a voice assistant, compared to a close friend/family member and to a stranger. Results show that speakers slowed their rate and produced less pitch variation in voice-assistant-"directed speech" (DS), relative to human-DS. These adjustments were not mediated by how often participants reported experiencing errors with automatic speech recognition. Overall, this paper addresses a limitation in the types of language varieties explored when examining technology-DS registers and contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of human-computer interaction.

STELA: a community-centred approach to norm elicitation for AI alignment

Value alignment, the process of ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are aligned with human values and goals, is a critical issue in AI research. Existing scholarship has mainly studied how to encode moral values into agents to guide their behaviour. Less attention has been given to the normative questions of whose values and norms AI systems should be aligned with, and how these choices should be made. To tackle these questions, this paper presents the STELA process (SocioTEchnical Language agent Alignment), a methodology resting on sociotechnical traditions of participatory, inclusive, and community-centred processes. For STELA, we conduct a series of deliberative discussions with four historically underrepresented groups in the United States in order to understand their diverse priorities and concerns when interacting with AI systems. The results of our research suggest that community-centred deliberation on the outputs of large language models is a valuable tool for eliciting latent normative perspectives directly from differently situated groups. In addition to having the potential to engender an inclusive process that is robust to the needs of communities, this methodology can provide rich contextual insights for AI alignment.

Cultivation of human centered artificial intelligence: culturally adaptive thinking in education (CATE) for AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous in human society, and yet vast segments of the global population have no, little, or counterproductive information about AI. It is necessary to teach AI topics on a mass scale. While there is a rush to implement academic initiatives, scant attention has been paid to the unique challenges of teaching AI curricula to a global and culturally diverse audience with varying expectations of privacy, technological autonomy, risk preference, and knowledge sharing. Our study fills this void by focusing on AI elements in a new framework titled Culturally Adaptive Thinking in Education for AI (CATE-AI) to enable teaching AI concepts to culturally diverse learners. Failure to contextualize and sensitize AI education to culture and other categorical human-thought clusters, can lead to several undesirable effects including confusion, AI-phobia, cultural biases to AI, increased resistance toward AI technologies and AI education. We discuss and integrate human behavior theories, AI applications research, educational frameworks, and human centered AI principles to articulate CATE-AI. In the first part of this paper, we present the development a significantly enhanced version of CATE. In the second part, we explore textual data from AI related news articles to generate insights that lay the foundation for CATE-AI, and support our findings. The CATE-AI framework can help learners study artificial intelligence topics more effectively by serving as a basis for adapting and contextualizing AI to their sociocultural needs.