Alan W Black

Alan W. Black is a Scottish computer scientist specializing in speech synthesis research. He served as a professor at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, and is now retired, living in Alaska. During his academic career, Dr. Black developed several seminal speech synthesis systems, including the Festival Speech Synthesis System and the open-source Flite engine. His work advanced multilingual speech synthesis technologies, significantly contributing to machine translation and speech processing technologies. Additionally, he co-founded Cepstral, a company focused on commercializing speech translation technologies.

• 1999-2022·Carnegie Mellon University·Professor
  • Researched language technologies and speech synthesis, developed open-source speech synthesis engines, and advanced multilingual speech processing.
• 1993-1999·University of Edinburgh and Kansai Science City, Japan·Researcher
  • Conducted research on speech synthesis and communication technologies.

• 1984-1986·University of Edinburgh·Master's Degree
  • Computer Science and Language Technology.
• 1986-1993·University of Edinburgh·Ph.D.
  • Focused on computational semantics and speech synthesis.
• 1980-1984·Coventry University·Bachelor's Degree
  • Major in Computer Science.