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About

Johanna Magdalena Kuch is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, voice perception, and gender studies in technology. Her work focuses on how voice design—particularly gender neutralization and personalization—shapes our perception of robots and synthetic agents. In her highly cited 2023 study, she demonstrated that gender-neutralizing both natural and synthetic voices significantly affects anthropomorphism, a finding with direct implications for designing more inclusive and less stereotyped robot voices. Her 2024 research further explored how gender ambiguity interacts with novelty and anthropomorphism across spoken and hummed modalities, revealing that the medium of vocalization itself alters user perception. Most notably, her 2025 study on voice cloning showed that personalizing a robot’s voice to match the user’s own can dramatically increase likability, outperforming both design-congruent and dissimilar voices. With a growing citation record and a clear trajectory toward applied robotics, Kuch’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in how voice design can make technology feel more human, more personal, and less biased.