Halcyon Lawrence

Halcyon Lawrence (17 June 1970 – 29 October 2023) was a professor of technical communication, best known for her work on bias in speech recognition technology.

Lawrence was born and raised in Trinidad, where she earned a bachelor's degree from University of the West Indies at St. Augustine. She worked as a technical trainer, and after 2004 or 5 also began adjuncting at UWI to teach technical writing. In 2006, she decided to leave industry for academia, ultimately returning to university at Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2018, Lawrence became a professor at Towson University, where she reached the rank of associate professor. She published a chapter, "Siri Disciplines," in the book Your Computer Is on Fire (2021), which was excerpted in Engadget. In this chapter, Lawrence argues that virtual assistants functionally discipline speakers into using a preferred, "standard" accent.

Lawrence died on October 29, 2023. In 2025, the journal Communication Design Quarterly published a collection of articles commemorating her impact.