English Linguist Expert

TELUS Digital AI Community; Manila; On-site; PHP 400,000 - 700,000; Full time

Job summary

TELUS Digital AI Community in Manila seeks an English linguist expert to evaluate and validate speech AI systems from a linguistic perspective. You will assess naturalness, pronunciation, prosody, and semantic accuracy to support high-quality TTS, ASR, and voice AI datasets.

You will provide structured feedback, annotate data, and document linguistic patterns across dialects to improve model performance while ensuring cultural authenticity for a global user base.

Qualifications

• Native-level English (C1/C2+) for accurate phonological and semantic analysis
• Professional English (B1+) for technical docs and collaboration
• Assessment of speech naturalness, grammar, semantics and pragmatics

Responsibilities

• Analyze AI-generated speech for naturalness, pronunciation, prosody, intonation and emotional register
• Identify transcription errors and dialect features in ASR outputs
• Provide linguistic feedback to improve TTS, ASR and voice AI datasets
• Annotate data with phonetic transcription and prosodic marks
• Document regional variations to inform dataset diversity

Skills

English phonetics

Phonology

Morphology

Syntax

Prosody analysis

Discourse coherence

Dialectology

Education

Bachelor's degree in Linguistics or related

2+ years linguistics or speech projects

Tools

IPA notation

SAMPA

Spectrogram analysis

Job description

As an English linguist expert in our Global AI Community, you evaluate and validate speech AI systems from a linguistic perspective—ensuring machine-generated voices communicate with natural language flow and prosody, speech recognition captures intent with linguistic accuracy,

and voice AI models are trained on linguistically sound datasets. Your work directly impacts millions of users' voice-based AI experiences by maintaining the highest standards of linguistic quality and cultural authenticity.

What You'll Do

Linguistic Analysis & Language Quality Assessment

• Analyze AI-generated speech (TTS) for naturalness of language patterns, pronunciation accuracy, prosodic rhythm, intonation, and emotional register from a linguistic perspective.
• Identify transcription errors, phonological and morphological issues, and linguistic nuances in speech recognition (ASR) outputs.
• Conduct linguistic quality evaluation of speech output, including assessment of grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse coherence.
• Apply phonetic and phonological analysis to identify pronunciation variations, dialectal features, and language-specific patterns.
• Provide structured linguistic feedback for model improvement
• Language Variation & Dialectological Analysis
• Apply expertise in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax to identify speech variations across English dialects and accents
• Analyze prosodic features including stress patterns, intonation contours, and rhythm across different speech varieties
• Document regional and sociolinguistic variations in speech patterns to inform dataset diversity
• Evaluate linguistic consistency and naturalness across different speaker profiles and contexts
• Review voice recordings for linguistic clarity, consistency, and technical quality
• Apply linguistic expertise to support creation and validation of high-quality speech datasets with attention to language structure and variation
• Perform detailed linguistic annotation and labeling for dataset integrity (phonetic transcription, prosodic markup, morphological tagging where applicable)
• Assess dataset diversity and representativeness from a linguistic perspective
• Identify and document linguistic patterns that improve ASR and TTS model performance
• Voice AI Project Support
• Support TTS, ASR, voice similarity, voice generation, and conversational AI evaluation projects with linguistic expertise
• Provide linguistic quality assurance for voice technology projects focused on naturalness and semantic/pragmatic accuracy
• Document linguistic findings to inform model improvement and contribute to research insights
• Assess how linguistic features impact user perception and model performance

Mandatory Qualifications

Education / Professional Background

One of the following:

• Bachelor's degree in Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Speech-Language Pathology, Computational Linguistics, Language Sciences, or related linguistic discipline

OR

• 2+ years professional experience in: linguistic analysis, speech science, language documentation, dialect research, computational linguistics, speech dataset creation, or voice AI linguistics projects

Linguistic & Technical Competency

• Advanced knowledge of English phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax
• Working knowledge of: phonetic transcription, spectrogram analysis, prosodic analysis, acoustic phonetics, and language quality assessment
• Familiarity with linguistic annotation tools and practices (IPA notation, SAMPA, or similar systems)
• Ability to apply linguistic frameworks to evaluate speech quality and language naturalness

Qualification path

Language Requirements:

• Native-level English (C1/C2+) – Required for accurate phonological, prosodic, and semantic analysis
• Professional English (B1+) – Required for technical documentation and collaboration
• Completion of subject-specific qualification assessment (linguistic analysis of speech samples)
• Identity verification (IDV) process – Required as soon as possible after application completion
• Preferred Qualifications
• Experience with speech science or phonetic research
• Familiarity with ASR or TTS technology from a linguistic perspective
• Knowledge of acoustic analysis tools or spectrograms software
• Experience in language resource creation or corpus linguistics
• Background in sociolinguistics or dialectology
• Published work or research in speech-related linguistics