R+D Activities

One year after the beginning of my PhD studies, I started my R+D activity at Ciència i Tecnologia Aplicada, S.A., a small sotware development company located in Barcelona, which was starting its activities in the field of speech recognition and, a bit later, of text-to-speech (TTS). I worked there, during almost three years, in the development of Fígaro, a speech recognition system for small vocabularies in Spanish and Catalan which received the Creativity Award of theCol·legi d'Enginyers de Catalunya, and in the development of MacVoz, a TTS system for Macintosh computers which was later distributed by Apple Spain.

Later, at the Speech Techology Division of Telefónica I+D, first in its Madrid centre (2000-2002) and later in Barcelona (2002-2007), I worked in the incorporation of several languages to the TTS system of the company, in the development of several synthetic voices, and in several projects oriented to the general improvement of the system, with a special emphasis on the modules for the generation of prosodic parameters (Cortázar et al., 2002; Armenta et al., 2003; Villarrubia et al., 2003; Rodríguez et al., 2008).

Finally, as a member of GLiCom, it can be mentioned my collaboration with the Speech and Language Group of Barcelona Media Foundation in several R+D projects related to the development or improvement of the TTS systems in Spanish and Catalan by Cereproc (Garrido et al., 2008) and Telefónica I+D.