Phonetician / Linguist (Spanish-US)

Omilia; Texas; On-site; USD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fixed compensation

Long-term employment with vacation

Professional development

Apple gear

Job summary

Omilia is seeking a senior linguist to ensure multilingual TTS linguistic and phonetic quality. You will design phoneme inventories, develop pronunciation lexicons, and review audio corpora to support enterprise-grade voice experiences.

Responsibilities include analyzes of American Spanish, documenting prosody and coarticulation, building language profiles for model training, and coordinating with engineers and reviewers to improve synthesis output.

Qualifications

• Must hold an advanced degree in linguistics or related field.
• Experience building pronunciation lexicons or G2P systems.
• Strong knowledge of phonological theory and phonetics.
• Proficiency with IPA and machine-readable phoneme notations.
• Experience with corpus annotation tools.
• Fluency in English and another language relevant to Omilia’s markets.
• Technical skills: Praat, ELAN, Audacity, SSML lexicon formats, basic scripting.

Responsibilities

• Conduct systematic phonological and phonetic analysis for American Spanish.
• 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 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 data collection prompts.
• Collaborate with TTS engineers to integrate linguistic artefacts into synthesis pipelines.
• Contribute to internal documentation and participate in research discussions.

Skills

Phonological analysis

Lexicon development

G2P systems

Linguistic documentation

Python or shell scripting

Education

M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Linguistics/Phonetics/Computational Linguistics

Tools

Praat

ELAN

WebAnno

Phonetisaurus/Sequitur

Audacity

Job description

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

• 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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• 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.

Omilia is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We believe that embracing diversity in all its forms enriches our workplace and drives our collective success. We are committed to creating an environment where everyone feels welcomed, valued, and empowered to contribute their unique perspectives without regard to factors such as race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, heredity, disability, age, or veteran status, all eligible candidates will be given consideration for employment.