What your voice gives away
Linguist Nicole Holliday explores how speech conveys social information such as region, age, race, and gender, often subconsciously influencing how people perceive one another. Her research takes on added significance with the rise of AI-generated voices that mimic human speech patterns. Holliday emphasizes the importance of basic linguistic research in understanding human communication and shaping equitable technological and social systems.
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Campus & community, People What your voice gives away In the debut of our new After Office Hours series, linguist Nicole Holliday reveals the signals hidden in how we speak. By Helen H. Lee Nicole Holliday, an associate professor of linguistics, studies the social information carried in speech. Brandon Sanchez / UC Berkeley April 29, 2026 When Kamala Harris speaks, Nicole Holliday hears her multicultural background and distinctly California roots. When a voice assistant answers a question, Holliday hears a set of choices engineered to sound human enough to trust. Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics, studies the social information carried in speech: the subtle cues of region, age, race and gender that listeners decode automatically, often without knowing they’re doing it.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Berkeley News.
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