The Birth of Speech Synthesis (2024)
Umeda Noriko was one of the pioneering speech scientists who first automated a range of voices – such as male, female, and child – in speech synthesis. She earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Tokyo and initially worked at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL, 電気試験所). Her significant contributions at ETL led to her recruitment by Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL). After moving to the US, Umeda and her team developed groundbreaking technologies in the 1970s, including the origins of female voice and natural speech in computer synthesis, as well as audio interfaces for blind individuals. Her remarkable work marks an early era in the history of AI. Later, Umeda became a professor of linguistics at New York University and later director of the Institute for Speech and Language Sciences.