[msb-alumni] Ann Syrdal, 74, Force Behind Female Computer Voice Died on July 24, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2020 17:35:27 -0400
BlankAnn Syrdal, 74, Force Behind Female Computer Voice. By Cade Metz.
As a researcher at AT&T, she helped lay the groundwork for modern digital
assistants
like Siri and Alexa. Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher
who
helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork
for
such modern digital assistants as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, died on July
24 at
her home in San Jose, Calif. She was 74. Her daughter Kristen Lasky said the
cause
was cancer.
As a researcher at AT&T, Dr. Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists
who
began developing synthetic speech systems in the mid-1980's.
It was not an entirely new phenomenon; AT&T had unveiled one of the first
synthetic
voices, developed at its Bell Labs, at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City.
But
more than 40 years later, despite increasingly powerful computers, speech
synthesis
was still relatively primitive.
"It just sounded robotic," said Tom Gruber, who worked on synthetic speech
systems in
the early '80's and went on to create the digital assistant that became Siri
when
Apple acquired it in 2010.
By 1990, companies like AT&T had started to deploy these new systems, allowing
the
hearing-impaired, for example, to generate synthetic speech for phone calls.
The
voices, though, typically sounded male.
That year, at the Bell Labs research center in Naperville, Ill., Dr. Syrdal
developed
a voice that sounded female -- a much harder result to achieve, in part because
so
much of the previous engineering work had been done for male voices. A decade
later,
she was part of a team at another AT&T lab, in Florham Park, N.J., that
developed a
system called Natural Voices. It became a standard-bearer for speech synthesis,
featuring what Dr. Syrdal and others called "the first truly high quality
female
synthetic voice."
In 2008, she was named a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in
recognition
of her contributions to the rise of female speech synthesis, which is now a
part of
everyday life, thanks to Siri and Alexa.
"She was driven -- and I mean driven -- to optimize the quality of female
voices,"
said Juergen Schroeter, who ran the Natural Voices project.
Ann Kristen Syrdal was born on Dec. 13, 1945, in Minneapolis. Her parents,
Richard
and Marjorie (Paulson) Syrdal, had met while working at Minneapolis-Honeywell
(now
Honeywell), a heating company that grew into a technology giant in the years
before
World War II. Her father, a physicist and engineer who developed vacuum tubes
and
other electrical technologies, died when Ann was 2. She was raised by her
mother, a
sales clerk at a Minneapolis department store.
When she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Syrdal had not considered
a
science career. But when a psychology professor asked for her help with a lab
experiment involving rats, she fell in love with lab work -- even after
realizing
that she was severely allergic to rats. She went on to earn both bachelor's and
Ph.D.
degrees in psychology before being hired as a researcher by the Callier Center
for
Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas.
In the early 1980s, after receiving a five-year grant from the National
Institutes of
Health, she began exploring the mechanics of human speech at the KTH Royal
Institute
of Technology in Stockholm and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When she moved to Bell Labs, female voice synthesis was not a major area of
research
anywhere.
"They all thought a female voice was just a higher frequency version of the
male
voice, but that never works," said H.S. Gopal, a speech researcher who worked
alongside Dr. Syrdal during those years. "The male engineers just didn't take
female
speech as seriously."
At first, she improved on earlier efforts to build female voices, but in the
late
1990's she joined a project that would help change the nature of speech
synthesis.
Rather than generating sounds from scratch, she and her colleagues developed
ways of
piecing together snippets of recorded human speech to form new words and new
sentences on the fly. Dr. Syrdal oversaw the recordings.
The first recordings were made with six women, and when AT&T's Natural Voices
system
topped an international competition for speech synthesizers in 1998 -- an
inflection
point for this technology -- it used a female voice.
Dr. Syrdal's marriages to Scot O'Malley, Robert Lasky and Stephen Marcus ended
in
divorce. In addition to her daughter Kristen Lasky, she is survived by her
partner of
23 years, Alistair Conkie, who worked alongside her at AT&T; a son, Sean
O'Malley;
another daughter, Barbara Evelyn Lasky; and eight grandchildren.
When Siri was integrated into Apple's iPhone in 2011, both female and male
voices
were offered.
"We did it because we wanted gender equality -- and because it was possible,"
Mr.
Gruber said "People respond differently to different voices."
In many countries, including the United States and Japan, female voices became
the
standard.
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