Phonetician / Linguist (fr-CA & en-CA)

Role Purpose

Ensure the linguistic and phonetic quality of Omilia ’s multilingual Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems by designing phoneme inventories, developing lexicons, and reviewing audio corpora to support enterprise-grade voice experiences.

Accountabilities

• Autonomy: Independently conduct phonological and phonetic analysis, design phoneme inventories, and develop lexicons for multiple languages.
• Scope & Complexity: Responsible for linguistic quality across all supported languages in TTS, including handling underrepresented phenomena and complex language-specific features.
• Impact: Directly influences the naturalness, accuracy, and quality of Omilia ’s TTS output, impacting customer experience in global contact center deployments.
• Influence/Mentorship: Collaborates with TTS engineers, data scientists, and ML researchers; coordinates with native-speaker reviewers and external annotation pipelines.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct systematic phonological and phonetic analysis of the Canadian French and Canadian English languages.
• Document language-specific features (prosody, stress, tone, coarticulation, dialect variation).
• Produce structured language profiles for TTS model training and evaluation.
• Define and maintain phoneme inventories; map to IPA and TTS-specific conventions.
• Corpus audits and optimal audio references selections for TTS target voice tuning
• Build and maintain pronunciation lexicons, including G2P rules and exceptions.
• Review and correct machine-generated G2P outputs; conduct pronunciation audits.
• Annotate audio corpora, develop evaluation protocols, and produce error analyses.
• Define linguistic criteria for TTS corpus selection and design prompts for data collection.
• Collaborate with TTS engineers to integrate linguistic artefacts into synthesis pipelines.
• Contribute to internal documentation and participate in research discussions.

Requirements

• M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Linguistics, Phonetics, Computational Linguistics, or related field.
• Proven experience building pronunciation lexicons or G2P systems for TTS or ASR.
• Deep knowledge of phonological theory, articulatory and acoustic phonetics.
• Proficiency with IPA and at least one machine-readable phoneme notation system (X-SAMPA, ARPAbet, etc.).
• Experience with corpus annotation tools (Praat, ELAN, WebAnno, etc.).
• Strong analytical and documentation skills.
• Fluency in English; proficiency in at least one additional language relevant to Omilia ’s markets.
• Technical skills: Praat, ELAN, Audacity, PLS/CMUdict/SSML lexicon formats, Phonetisaurus/Sequitur/neural G2P, basic Python or shell scripting, TTS text normalization.

Benefits

• Fixed compensation;
• Long-term employment with the working days vacation;
• Development in professional growth (courses, training, etc);
• Being part of successful cutting-edge technology products that are making a global impact in the service industry;
• Proficient and fun-to-work-with colleagues;
• Apple gear.

Originally posted on Himalayas