People
People in speech and audio
46 people in the USASI People directory whose profiles list speech and audio as a field of their work. Listed alphabetically; this is not a ranking. Each profile covers public professional work only, cited to official pages.
Abdelrahman Mohamed
Research scientist at FAIR (joined September 2018), Facebook AI Research
Speech researcher; co-author of wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT at Facebook AI Research
Alec Radford
Listed with an "Independent" affiliation on 2026 arXiv papers, Independent researcher
First author of GPT-2, CLIP and Whisper at OpenAI; independent researcher on 2026 papers
Alex Graves
Author affiliated with Google DeepMind on the 2016 Nature paper on the differentiable neural computer, Google DeepMind
First author of Neural Turing Machines and of the Google DeepMind differentiable neural computer paper
Alexandre Défossez
Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Gradium
Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Gradium and co-founder of Kyutai; behind MusicGen, EnCodec and Moshi
Alexei Baevski
Company listed on Baevski's GitHub profile, Google
First author of wav2vec 2.0 and data2vec at Facebook AI; fairseq co-author
Boris Ginsburg
Applied research scientist, NVIDIA
NVIDIA applied research scientist; last-listed author on Parakeet speech recognition papers
Dan Jurafsky
Reynolds Professor in Humanities; Professor of Linguistics; Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
Stanford professor of linguistics and computer science; co-author of Speech and Language Processing
David Harwath
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science; leads the SALT Lab, The University of Texas at Austin
UT Austin assistant professor who leads the SALT Lab; former MIT CSAIL research scientist
Dong Yu
VP of AI Foundations, Capital One
VP of AI Foundations at Capital One; former Microsoft Research principal researcher; first author on CNTK
Edouard Grave
Chief Language Officer (listed among alumni), Kyutai
Equal-contribution author of Meta's LLaMA paper; co-author of fastText and of Kyutai's Moshi
Emmanuel Dupoux
Professor (EHESS), Cognitive machine learning team, EHESS
EHESS professor in the Cognitive Machine Learning team; co-author of FAIR's generative spoken language work
Gabriel Synnaeve
Research scientist (joined FAIR as a postdoctoral researcher in 2015; listed with Meta Superintelligence Labs on a 2026 paper), Meta
Research scientist at Meta; last author of Code Llama and co-author of Wav2Letter, EnCodec, and MusicGen
Heiga Zen
Principal Scientist (from June 2023), Google DeepMind
Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind; WaveNet co-author and an original author of HTS speech synthesis
Hsiao-Wuen Hon
Emeritus Researcher, Microsoft Research
Emeritus Researcher at Microsoft Research; former Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia
Jade Copet
Listed with Meta AI, FAIR Team on the EnCodec paper (2022) and with Meta AI on the MusicGen paper (2023), Meta AI
First author of MusicGen and co-first author of EnCodec, both released in Meta's AudioCraft library
Jiatong Shi
Organization listed on Shi's GitHub profile, Anuttacon
First author of the VERSA speech and audio evaluation toolkit; former PhD student in CMU's WAVLab
Jonathan Cohen
Credited in Nemotron 3 leadership (December 2025) and Nemotron 3 Super contributors (April 2026), NVIDIA
NVIDIA AI software leader who led NeMo development; listed in the Nemotron 3 leadership credits
Jonathan Shen
Software Engineer (Tacotron 2 blog byline, December 2017), Google
First author of the Tacotron 2 text-to-speech paper, written as a software engineer at Google
Jong Wook Kim
Member of technical staff (since August 2019), OpenAI
OpenAI member of technical staff; co-author of CLIP and Whisper and maintainer of the Whisper repository
Ju-Chieh Chou
Ph.D. student, advised by Karen Livescu, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
TTIC PhD student in speech and language processing; former research intern at Meta and Microsoft
Kai-Fu Lee
Founder and CEO, 01.AI
Founder and CEO of 01.AI; developed CMU's Sphinx speech recognizer; earlier at Apple, Microsoft and Google
Karan Goel
CEO and Founder, Cartesia
CEO and founder of Cartesia; co-author of the S4 and SaShiMi state space model papers
Karen Livescu
Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
Professor at TTI-Chicago working on speech and language processing; former MIT EECS post-doctoral lecturer
Koray Kavukcuoglu
SVP, Google DeepMind, Google DeepMind
SVP of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google; co-author of the DQN and WaveNet papers
Li Deng
Chief Scientist of AI, founder of the Deep Learning Technology Center, and Partner Research Manager (2000–2017), Microsoft and Microsoft Research
Former Chief Scientist of AI at Microsoft and founder of its Deep Learning Technology Center
Mazin Gilbert
Executive Director, Agentic AI Foundation
Executive Director of the Agentic AI Foundation at the Linux Foundation; IEEE Fellow
Michael Auli
Principal Research Scientist/Director, Meta
Former Principal Research Scientist/Director at Meta FAIR; last author of wav2vec 2.0, fairseq, and MMS
Neil Zeghidour
Audio Research Advisor, Kyutai
First author of SoundStream and co-author of AudioLM at Google Research; Audio Research Advisor at Kyutai
Oriol Vinyals
Vice President, Google DeepMind, Google DeepMind
Vice President at Google DeepMind; co-author of sequence-to-sequence learning and the TensorFlow white paper
Pete Warden
CEO, Useful Sensors Inc
CEO of Useful Sensors, founding member of the TensorFlow team, and co-author of TinyML and Moonshine
Prafulla Dhariwal
Research scientist working on generative models and unsupervised learning, OpenAI
Research scientist at OpenAI; co-author of Diffusion Models Beat GANs, GLIDE, Jukebox, and Glow
Rama Akkiraju
Vice president of AI for IT, NVIDIA
Vice president of AI for IT at NVIDIA; former IBM Fellow and CTO of IBM Watson AI Operations
RJ Skerry-Ryan
Researcher listed in Google Research's people directory (publications 2017–2025), Google Research
Google researcher; co-author of Tacotron and Tacotron 2 and first author of Tacotron prosody transfer
Rohit Prasad
Chief Executive Officer, Boston Dynamics
CEO of Boston Dynamics since October 2026; previously head scientist for Alexa and AGI at Amazon
Ronan Collobert
Research scientist, Machine Learning Research, Apple
Research scientist in Apple Machine Learning Research; developer of Torch, wav2letter, and flashlight
Ruoming Pang
Listed with Meta Platforms on the ScaleAcross Explorer paper (May 2026); GitHub profile lists Meta, Meta
Overall lead of Apple's 2024 foundation language models and corresponding author of AXLearn; now at Meta
Sanyuan Chen
Research Scientist, Meta
Research scientist at Meta FAIR; first author of WavLM and co-first author of VALL-E
Shinji Watanabe
Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University; first author of the ESPnet speech processing toolkit
Shiv Rao
CEO and co-founder, Abridge
Co-founder and CEO of Abridge, which drafts clinical documentation from clinician-patient conversations
Wei-Ning Hsu
Research Scientist, Meta AI
Research scientist at Meta AI (formerly FAIR); first author of HuBERT
Xu Tan
Research VP of Multimodality, Moonshot AI
Research VP of Multimodality at Moonshot AI; formerly Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research Asia
Xuedong Huang
Chief Technology Officer, Zoom
Chief Technology Officer of Zoom; former Azure AI CTO and Technical Fellow at Microsoft
Yao Qian
Principal Researcher, Microsoft
Principal Researcher in Microsoft's Speech and Dialog Research Group; co-author of WavLM
Yi Ren
Leads the foundation video model research team, HeyGen
First author of FastSpeech and FastSpeech 2; former MSRA intern; leads video model research at HeyGen
Yonghui Wu
First author of Google's 2016 GNMT paper, Google
First author of the paper on Google's Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT); co-author of Lingvo
Yu-An Chung
Research Scientist, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), Meta
Research scientist at FAIR (Meta) working on speech; in the technical leadership of Omnilingual ASR
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