Speech Technology

Leeuwarden is a medium-sized vibrant student city and the capital of the province of Fryslân. This is a city of innovation, home to many start-ups and established companies, including established game and tech businesses which could collaborate on speech technology applications. The city hosts universities, colleges, research institutes, and language-related NGOs. Speech technology is even recognized by the province as a crucial domain of regional interest, indicating strong local support.

• this is the only graduate programme dedicated to speech synthesis and speech recognition
• it is interdisciplinary in nature and students from diverse backgrounds collaborate with each other and industrial partners
• it offers the opportunity to develop speech recognizers, make synthetic voices, and execute empirical experiments
• it creates space for you to showcase your expertise by making a demonstrator as your thesis project
• it is located in Leeuwarden, a multilingual reality with locals speaking the Frisian language alongside Dutch, English and a number of others. It is, then, an interesting test-bed for speech technology developments involving less-resourced languages, multilingualism and code switching.

NB: You may notice that our programme is occasionally referred to as "Voice Technology." This is because we are in the process of transitioning the name to "Speech Technology." While we are working diligently to update all our materials, some references to the previous name may still appear. If you have any questions about the name change, please don't hesitate to reach out to us!

The MSc. in Voice Technology prepares you for a meaningful career in the industry of speech technology. The combination of programming and machine learning skills with linguistics knowledge is a very attractive feature for the labor market. The skills you acquire throughout this master's will enable to work in speech labs of the bigger tech companies, both in Europe and beyond. If you wish, you can also choose for an academic career.

Throughout the programme we invite several guest speakers from industry. That way students will get a good impression of the various possibilities ranging from developing speech recognizer, synthetic voices, automatic detection of pathologies from speech, the use of speech technology in robotica and/or dialogue systems, etc. The speech technology industry is a fast-growing market which provides lots of opportunities for graduates.

The MSc. Speech Technology is embodied in the “Culture, Language and Technology” research department. Which consists of an international, multidisciplinary team of PhD's and postdoctoral researchers working on topics as diverse as voice-based disease recognition, multilingualism and the brain, speech synthesis for under-resourced languages, multilingual ethnography, and more.

Some of these young scholars may make a guest appearance in your lectures and provide opportunities to connect to doctoral research projects, co-authored publications, or one of our multiple EU-subsidized research grants.