Speech Science Forum - Benedetta Cevoli & Bethan Thomas (Speechmatics)

Benedetta is a Cognitive Scientist with expertise across the fields of social sciences and natural language processing (NLP) interested in making technologies work for everyone. She’s currently focussing on topics of AI Bias and inclusion in the settings of automatic speech Recognition as a Data Scientist at Speechmatics. She previously completed an interdisciplinary PhD between Psychology and Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London studying the interlinks between artificial language models and human language. She has published several peer-reviewed scientific articles across the field of psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and sleep and holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of Trieste, Italy.

Bethan is a Machine Learning Engineer specializing in speech technology. She has a background in linguistics, from where she moved into the field of speech and language processing. She has several years industry experience working on various projects including text-to-speech, automatic language evaluation, sign language generation and, most recently, automatic speech recognition. She is passionate about understanding and reducing bias in AI systems, as well as methods to utilize the huge power of self-supervised learning for speech.