What are the responsibilities and job description for the Phonetician / Linguist (Spanish-US) position at Omilia?
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
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
- Conduct systematic phonological and phonetic analysis of the American Spanish language
- 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
- 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
- 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