Shira Michel

Shira Michel, Benjamin Taylor, Sabrina Parra Díaz et al.

Recent breakthroughs in Generative AI (GenAI) are reshaping educational landscapes, presenting challenges and opportunities. While all contexts present unique challenges, rural schools are historically under-resourced, facing persistent technology-related barriers. To understand and reduce these barriers, we studied 31 rural high school educators across three U.S. states to examine their use of GenAI and understand how GenAI introduces new challenges, opportunities, and may exacerbate existing educational barriers. Results show while rural educators use GenAI to streamline teaching tasks, existing resource disparities restrict meaningful integration. Through rural educators' voices, we reveal issues like infrastructure barriers, resistance to adoption, and lack of AI literacy training create significant obstacles. Nonetheless, educators envision GenAI can support themselves and their students, but findings emphasize the need for rural-specific design approaches. As a community, embracing inclusive GenAI design and re-examining assumptions about technology adoption in under-served educational contexts is essential to reducing barriers rather than widening them.

Shira Michel, Sufi Kaur, Sarah Elizabeth Gillespie et al.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) speech generation and voice cloning technologies have produced naturalistic speech and accurate voice replication, yet their influence on sociotechnical systems across diverse accents and linguistic traits is not fully understood. This study evaluates two synthetic AI voice services (Speechify and ElevenLabs) through a mixed methods approach using surveys and interviews to assess technical performance and uncover how users' lived experiences influence their perceptions of accent variations in these speech technologies. Our findings reveal technical performance disparities across five regional, English-language accents and demonstrate how current speech generation technologies may inadvertently reinforce linguistic privilege and accent-based discrimination, potentially creating new forms of digital exclusion. Overall, our study highlights the need for inclusive design and regulation by providing actionable insights for developers, policymakers, and organizations to ensure equitable and socially responsible AI speech technologies.