Phonetician / Linguist (fr-CA & en-CA)

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.

• 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.

• →Conduct systematic phonological and phonetic analysis of the Canadian French and Canadian English languages.
• →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.

• 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.