Research Scientist: Text-to-Speech

AI That Moves the World. Careers That Move You Forward.
At Cerence AI, you’ll help transform advanced AI into trusted, real-world solutions that make complex technology – think vehicles, robots, smart manufacturing, and emerging intelligent devices – more natural, reliable, and useful. Building on decades of innovation and global deployment in automotive, we are extending our expertise into new products, markets, and intelligent systems. 

As part of our global team, you’ll work alongside leading innovators, researchers, engineers, and business leaders to solve meaningful challenges and turn breakthrough ideas into technology people use every day. You’ll have the opportunity to make a visible impact, help shape Cerence AI’s next chapter, and move your own career forward.

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Employment Type: Full-time  

CerenceAI RD is seeking a TTS Research Scientist to design and implement the next-generation text-to-speech systems and applications. In this role, with members in globe, you will work across both frontend (Grapheme-to-phoneme, Text Normalization, phrasing and prosodic control, etc) and backend (acoustic modeling, neural vocoding) components of TTS pipelines and end-2-end system for major languages and dialects. Your work will directly impact CerenceAI products ranging from voice assistants to accessibility tools, delivering natural, expressive, and multilingual speech synthesis.

Job Description

Representative responsibilities/duties will include but not limited to:

·       Design and optimize text/NLP preprocessing pipelines with Deep Learning or Machine Learning methods, including Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for multilingual support; Text normalization; polyphone disambiguation; Prosody prediction and control  

·       Integrate language models (e.g., BERT, GPT variants) to improve contextual and semantic understanding for natural intonation

·       Develop rule-based and neural solutions for emotion/style control in synthesized speech

·       Build state-of-the-art acoustic models (e.g., VITS, VALL-E, CosyVoice) to map linguistic features to spectrograms or waveform parameters.  

·       Optimize neural vocoders (e.g., HiFi-GAN, MelGAN, Vocos) for high-fidelity, real-time speech synthesis

·       Optimize inference latencies for both edge devices and cloud platforms

·       Enhance robustness through noise suppression, speaker adaptation, and multilingual/cross-language/cross -gender voice cloning

Knowledge, skills, and qualifications 

Education: Master in CS, AI, EE, Math, or related field. 

Required/preferred skills: 

·       2+ years of hands-on experience in TTS system development with deep expertise in both frontend and backend components

·       Proficiency in C/C++ and Python, with mastery of ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc)

·       Some background in NLP techniques and/or speech signal processing is a plus

·       Knowledge on transformer-based language models for prosody prediction

·       Basic understanding of autoregressive / non-autoregressive acoustic models and neural vocoders

·       Experience in optimizing models via quantization, pruning, or knowledge distillation  

·       Experience with ONNX Runtime, TensorRT, or TorchScript, etc

·       Experience with zero-shot/one-shot/few-shot voice cloning or emotional TTS systems  

·       Skilled GPU/TPU cluster and grid user

·       Fluent English is a must-have

CerenceAI champions diversity and innovation. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds. 

Cerence AI (NASDAQ: CRNC) helps people and intelligent systems work together naturally and reliably. Proven at global scale in automotive, Cerence provides the trusted interaction and action layer connecting people, machines, and intelligent systems. Its AI platform enables natural interaction and dependable action across complex real-world environments where reliability, safety, security, and performance are critical. Working with customers and partners worldwide, Cerence transforms advanced AI into trusted solutions that bridge the gap between AI potential and real-world performance.

For more information, visit www.cerence.ai.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Cerence is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, protected military or veteran status, genetic information and other protected classifications. Cerence Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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