9 December 2025

Ben Gibb-Reid presented his research at Alexandria University's Forensic Phonetics and Linguistics seminar series. He presented on "Interpreting the phonetic variation of discourse features for applications to forensic speaker comparison", discussing findings and implications from his PhD research and upcoming publications.

8 December 2025

PhD student Alice Richardson has a new publication in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique. The paper is titled "Interpreters in UK Asylum Appeals: Evidence and Impact" and considers the role of interpreters in the UK asylum system by analysing over 20 years' worth of published reports of asylum appeals.

27 November 2025

Amelia Gully, along with colleagues from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, will be running a special session at the Interspeech 2026 conference in Sydney, Australia. The special session - Methods and data for vocal tract shape and articulation analysis - will bring together people working across many different disciplines at Interspeech to focus on sharing methods and data for studying vocal tract shape and articulation.

27 November 2025

Ben Gibb-Reid was invited to Aston University in Birmingham to present his research for the weekly Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics seminar series. His talk was titled "Interpreting the phonetic variation of discourse features for applications" and discussed the findings from his PhD research, assessing the speaker discriminant capability of "yeah" and "just".

25 November 2025

Lauren Harrington travelled down to London and attended the workshop Under Investigation: Large Language Models for Policing, which was hosted by the PROBabLE Futures project (based at Northumbria University) and the National Police Chiefs' Council. Attendees from a range of areas - including the government, policing, industry and academia - gathered to discuss the central question "What needs to be in an evaluation framework for language models in law enforcement?".

20-22 October 2025

Vince Hughes and Jess Wormald attended the National Police Chiefs' Council Innovation and Digital Summit in Liverpool, to talk about Forensic Speech Services (FoSS). The summit provided valuable updates and context about developments in current policing. Vince and Jess spoke to delegates from across policing in addition to industry exhibitors about speech, language and AI in policing and forensics.

16 October 2025

Lauren Harrington was invited to Aston University in Birmingham to present her research for the weekly Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics seminar series. Her talk was titled "Safeguarding justice: A linguistic perspective on speech technology for police interview transcription" and discussed the findings from her PhD research and several follow-up studies carried out in collaboration with FSS@York colleagues.

1 October 2025

Lauren Harrington has been awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (£106,412.72) by the White Rose Doctoral Training Programme. The fellowship is designed to provide a career development opportunity and support the fellow in consolidating their PhD through developing publications, networks and their research and professional skills. Over the next 12 months, Lauren will be adapting parts of her PhD thesis for publication, developing research funding bids, and establishing an international network of academics and practitioners focused on forensic transcription and its practices.

25 September 2025

Jess Wormald and Lauren Harrington attended the AI and Policing: TIPS Innovation Forum hosted by the N8 Policing Research Partnership and SPRITE+ in Manchester on 25th September. In the penultimate session, Jess gave a talk on "Speech and Audio Forensics: Benefits, Challenges, and Ethics" which led to some very interesting discussions amongst attendees. It was a very informative day, with other talks addressing concepts such as trust, identity and privacy in the context of AI.

22 September 2025

PhD student Alice Richardson featured on the Book of Refugees podcast, talking about interpreters in the UK asylum seeking process. Her research looks at the role of language as evidence in asylum claims and how interpreters affect outcomes.

You can listen on Spotify or on the University of York website.

11 September 2025

Jess Wormald, James Tompkinson and Lauren Harrington - along with fellow York LLS staff member Eloísa Monteoliva-García - have been busy this summer running workshops on transcription and interpreting in legal contexts. In June, they hosted attendees from various police and government audio laboratories and in September, they were invited by the Home Office unit Accelerated Capability Environment to run the workshop in Vauxhall, London. 

8-9 September 2025

Amelia Gully attended the 2nd Interdisciplinary Voice Conference at Newnham College, Cambridge, a cross-disciplinary gathering designed to form a cohesive community with shared interest in the voice and vocality, within and across species. 

3 September 2025

The House of Lords Public Services Committee has recently launched a private inquiry into police interview transcription. James Tompkinson and Lauren Harrington were invited to submit written evidence on the topic, which encompassed both police interview recordings and forensic audio materials in the initial call. Their written reports can be found on the Parliament Committees website.

James was then invited down to London to present oral evidence alongside Kate Haworth and Helen Fraser. This was the first of three hearings held by the Public Services Committee, and two weeks later, a number of lawyers and police officers were also called to contribute to the inquiry. James' appearance in Parliament can be watched on the Parliament Live TV website.

28 August 2025

Comments by Amelia Gully and Jess Wormald were included in a news article published in The i Paper. The article titled "Sex offenders and other criminals could walk free due to 'deepfake' evidence" discusses the significant threats posed by deepfakes and the lack of infrastructure in British police forces to counter these risks. A Home Office letter sent to all police forces in 2024 warned of the dangers posed by deepfake technology, yet only two forces currently have structures in place to deal with AI-generated material. Amelia provided commentary on the potential risks that deepfakes present to the integrity of forensic speech science, and Jess emphasised that in certain situations, the safest course of action may be to exclude evidence suspected of AI manipulation.

17-21 August 2025

Lauren Harrington, Phil Harrison and Amelia Gully travelled back to the Netherlands in August, this time for the annual Interspeech conference from 17th-21st August. Lauren and Phil were representing the PASR project and presented a poster on Wednesday afternoon, entitled "Variability in performance across four generations of automatic speaker recognition systems". You can read the proceedings paper on the ISCA archive.

Amelia was supporting her Australian collaborators, whose papers you can read at the following links:

• Piyadasa, Glaunès, Gully, Proctor, Ballard, Szalay, Sanaei, Foster, Waddington & Jin

• Szalay, Proctor, Hully, Piyadasa, Jin, Waddington, Sanaei, Foster & Ballard

• Proctor, Szalay, Piyadasa, Jin, Sanaei, Gully, Waddington, Foster & Ballard

The FSS@York staff were joined by PhD student Emily Kiff, who presented her research plans at the 11th Doctoral Consortium, receiving feedback from a panel of expert mentors across a range of speech science and speech technology backgrounds.

20-23 July 2025

The whole FSS@York group attended the annual International Association for Forensic Phonetics & Acoustics conference from 20th-23rd July in The Hague, Netherlands. Several members of the group gave oral presentations, including:

• James Tompkinson (& Andrea Nini): Assessing the suitability of forensic authorship analysis methodologies for speech data

• Jess Wormald, Vince Hughes & Joe Pattison: Bridging the gap: Expanding the scope of academic engagement to support practitioners

• James Tompkinson: Teaching practices in Forensic Language Analysis

• Lauren Harrington (& the PASR project team): Variability in the performance of automatic speaker recognition systems across modelling approaches

There were also 13 presentations in the poster sessions by staff members, current MSc students and recent alumni of the FSS group.

16-18 June 2025

Vince Hughes and Amelia Gully, along with other members of FSS@York, were co-organisers of the 2025 UKIS conference from 16th-17th June. They welcomed 148 attendees to the University of York, including members of the UK & Ireland speech science and speech technology community from both academia and industry. Keynotes were delivered by Professor Mark Huckvale, Professor Verena Rieser and Dr Nadine Lavan.

The UKIS conference was followed by the YorVoice conference on 18th June, showcasing the work of YorVoice, York's interdisciplinary voice research community with a focus on the uniqueness of the individual voice. The keynote was delivered by Professor Jody Kreiman.

19-20 May 2025

In May, FoSS (specifically, Joe Pattison, Jess Wormald and Vince Hughes) hosted a workshop to discuss the importance of regulation, accreditation and validation within forensic speech science. The event was attended by most UK practitioners in FSS, international experts, and representatives from UKAS and other forensic disciplines.  Consideration was made of both barriers and solutions in this area, with proposals around how best to move the field forward agreed at the workshop. Outcomes will be presented at this year’s IAFPA as part of a special session on Quality.

11 April 2025

At an online IAFPA webinar, Jess Wormald and Lauren Harrington presented findings from their IAFPA-funded research project "Panjabi-English in Bradford and Leicester - creating a resource for practitioners and testing automatic transcription with non-Anglo speech". While the project had originally aimed to create a sociophonetic resource for practitioners, the research has focused on developing on a pipeline for transcription, incorporating an automatic speech recognition system and a post-editing procedure; Tallulah Buckley and Phil Harrison are also collaborating on the project.

1 March 2025

Ben Gibb-Reid, Jess Wormald and Vince Hughes have been awarded an IAFPA research grant (£1,440.44) for their project "You’re having me on: assessing deepfake audio performance across regional and L2 dialects of English". This project investigates the ability of deepfake audio to recreate the speech of individuals, focusing on the phonetic accuracy of specific segmental realisations according to context. The study will evaluate spoofed speech against real speech using knowledge of expected phonological variation applied directly to the forensic audio casework context.

31 January 2025

A new series of BBC drama podcast "Exemplar" is out today. It features two forensic audio experts carrying out cases. Katherine Earnshaw and Bryony Nuttall from FVC and PhD student James Zjalic from Verden Forensics acted as consultants for the production team.

17 December 2024

"An Introduction to Forensic Phonetics and Forensic Linguistics" by Adrian Leeman, Ria Perkins, Grace Sullivan Baker and our very own Paul Foulkes has been published just in time for Christmas.

“An Introduction to Forensic Phonetics and Forensic Linguistics” is an authoritative and timely introduction to the use of linguistic science in the courtroom, providing the theoretical background and a practical discussion of the intricacies of speaker identification, earwitness accuracy, dialect variation, and other evidentiary issues.  This book will be of value to experts in the fields of linguistics and phonetics, as a guide to solid forensic practices, and also to those present in the courtroom, as a caution against inferring greater reliability than an expert has claimed.  Academics in these fields have been waiting for years for a book of this calibre to appear.

- Sandra Disner