History of Speech and Language Technology

David Talkin is a research scientist working on a speech recognition project at Google. His previous work in speech synthesis, as well as his work in speech recognition and other aspects of speech technology, were carried out as a Principal Scientist at Rhetorical Systems, as Director of Speech Synthesis at Dragon Systems, as Senior Voice Technology Manager at General Magic, as Vice President for Technology at Entropic Research Laboratory, and as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Hewlett Packard, and Texas Instruments. While at Bell Laboratories, he was involved in the development of the waves speech research toolkit. His contributions at Rhetorical were embodied in the natural-sounding rvoice text-to-speech product.

An interview was conducted with David Talkin at his home on June 3, 2005, by Dr. Janet Baker. The text of this interview has not yet been transcribed, but a brief excerpt of the recorded interview is available.

Brief excerpt of recorded interview.