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

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 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.