Biases in current voice technologies for non-white users has the potential to cause lower self esteem, psychological and physical harm researchers have found. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, HCII Ph.D. student Kimi Wenzel and Associate Professor Geoff Kaufamn identified six downstream harms caused by voice assistant errors. The pair also devised strategies to reduce them in their work which won a Best Paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.