Voice Technology

The Voice Technology MSc. is the only graduate programme dedicated to voice synthesis and speech recognition. This is an interdisciplinary programme in which students from diverse backgrounds collaborate with each other and industrial partners. You will develop speech recognizers, make synthetic voices, and execute empirical experiments. Your thesis project also includes making a demonstrator to showcase your expertise.

Leeuwarden is a city of innovation, home to many start-ups and established companies, including serious game and tech businesses which could collaborate on voice technology applications. Additionally, there are several other universities, colleges, research institutes, and language-related NGOs. Voice technology is even recognized by the province as a crucial domain of regional interest, indicating strong political support for this master's programme.

Leeuwarden is a medium-sized vibrant student city and the capital of the province of Fryslân. It is a highly cultural city, recently named the European Capital of Culture. It offers many festivals, bars, cinemas, museums, theatres, and parks. Leeuwarden, like all of Fryslân, is multilingual with many locals speaking the Frisian language alongside Dutch, English and others. It is, then, an interesting test-bed for voice technology developments involving less-resourced languages, multilingualism and code switching.

Affordable housing and accommodation are easily found. The inter-city high-speed trains provide easy connection to the nearby city of Groningen and many other cities, from The Hague to Amsterdam.

After your studies you can work in industry, for example at the speech labs of the bigger tech companies. Due to the interdisciplinary character of the programme students from different backgrounds learn to communicate and work together. The combination of programming and machine learning skills with linguistics knowledge is a very attractive feature for the labor market. Of course students can also pursue an academic career. Thus, there are several academic speech labs in Europe and beyond.

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 voice technology in robotica and/or dialogue systems, etc. The voice technology industry is a fast-growing market which provides lots of opportunities for graduates.

The MSc. Voice 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, voice 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.