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TANIYA MISHRA: At AT&T, I work primarily on speech synthesis and speech analysis.
A recent app that uses text to speech that I worked on that I think is very cool and fun
And Story Book reads children's stories using character
appropriate voices. It basically synthesizes or creates the
sounds for the text on the fly. So, it's the computer reading a story, except
that for each of the characters it uses a different voice. BOOK: ...stairs, come on along Sonny.
There they go up on my shoulder.
TANIYA MISHRA: And so, that's very engaging for kids. And since it's directed towards kids, we also made it into an
educational app. What the kids are doing is that they are you know,
hearing a word and seeing it highlighted at the same time. So, it will help them learn how to pronounce
words better as well. The way I acquired the skills to work in the
career that I have right now, was because of the majors that I pursued.
I had computer science and mathematics as my undergraduate majors and
in graduate school, I pursued computer science with a focus on speech technology.
And I'm so glad that I did, because without having that as a foundation, there was no
way that I could work in text-to-speech, which in turn helps people in all the ways that it does.
Another thing that makes my job really cool
is that I have the freedom to define my own problems and to come up with my own solutions.
And most of the time, when I'm walking into work I don't think I have the answers. This has never been done before.
I don't know how it's supposed to be solved, but I get
to try out a whole bunch of things. For the next generation of young scientists and engineers
my advice would be, perhaps be the same as what my math teacher gave me, be
curious, ask why, ask lots and lots of whys.
Be undaunted by problems that seem really big, because, you know, maybe you are the first
person to be thinking about that problem.