LINGUIST List 13.950

Sun Apr 7 2002

Jobs: Text-to-Speech Synthesis: Scientist, London UK

Editor for this issue: Heather Taylor-Loring <heatherlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. David Horowitz, Text-to-Speech Synthesis: Principal or Senior, Vox Generation Ltd, UK

Rank of Job: Principal or Senior
Areas Required: Principal or Senior Scientist TTS
Other Desired Areas: EE, Math, Physics
University or Organization: Vox Generation Ltd
Department: FASiL
State or Province: England
Country: United Kingdom
Final Date of Application: June 1, 2002
Contact: David Horowitz dhorowitzvoxgeneration.com

Address for Applications:
8 Duncannon
London
England WC2N 4JF
United Kingdom

Principal or Senior Scientist in Digital Signal Processing for
Text-to-speech Synthesis

Work on a large international project hosted at Vox Generation Ltd.
Vox is building a scientific team of 18 individuals to focus on full
mixed-initiative conversational dialogue systems. In this role, you
will research and innovate new techniques in Unified Hierarchical
Language Modelling for training conversational dialogue systems. This
project is partnered with SpeechWorks International on the development
of new language modelling techniques.

We are developing a large-vocabulary TTS. We will implement a patent
pending technique for training and unit-selection. We will base the
TTS on an open-source standard, but productise it. We have built an
automatic prosody markup parsing scheme, reducing the need for hand
annotated corpora for prosody. You will extend this technique for
intelligent selection of speech segments using the ToBI technique.
Unique to the R&D effort, is to apply formant synthesis and acoustic
tube modelling techniques to interpret and join units. We have
demonstrated human quality limited domain voices.

You should have a Ph.D. in Digital Signal Processing, Electrical
Engineering, Mathematics or Physics. Industry experience is sought,
but you do not have had to work on TTS. Radar signal processing, for
example, is fine. You should be analytical and have demonstrated high
proficiency in mathematics. A-levels in quantitative sciences should
be perfect scores or near perfect scores.

Contact David Horowitz, Chief Scientist
Vox Generation Ltd
http://www.voxgeneration.com
dhorowitzvoxgeneration.com