Ann Kristen Syrdal (December 13, 1945July 24, 2020) was an American

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...

and computer science researcher who worked with

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

technology. She developed the first female-sounding voice synthesizer.

Early life

Syrdal was born on December 13, 1945, in Minneapolis. Her father, Richard, was a physicist and engineer; her mother, Marjorie () was a sales clerk. She was raised by her mother after her father died when she was two years old.

Career

Syrdal became interested in psychology after helping with laboratory experiments involving rats, and subsequently completed a bachelor and then PhD degree in psychology. After receiving her PhD, she began research work at the University of Texas at Dallas's Callier Center for Communication Disorders. In the early 1980s she received a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, and began studying the mechanics of human speech at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After the grant ended, Syrdal took a job at

AT&T Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

. At the time, synthesized voices were primarily male. In 1990 she developed a system that could generate a female voice. In the 1990s she joined a project that developed a new method of speech synthesis; instead of creating the sounds artificially, the synthesis joined fragments of recorded speech to create new words and sentences. Sydral oversaw the initial recordings, of six women's voices. In 1998, AT&T's "Natural Voices" system won an international competition for speech synthesizers, using a female voice. She was named a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 2008, for her work in female speech synthesis. Syrdal died of cancer on July 24, 2020, in San Jose, California.

Personal life

Syrdal married and divorced three times; at the time of her death she had been in a

domestic partnership A domestic partnership is a legal relationship, usually between couples, who live together and share a common domestic life, but are not married (to each other or to anyone else). People in domestic partnerships receive benefits that guarantee r ...

for 23 years. She had three children, a son and two daughters.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Syrdal, Ann 1945 births 2020 deaths American women psychologists American psychologists Deaths from cancer in California Fellows of the Acoustical Society of America Human–computer interaction researchers Scientists from Minneapolis University of Minnesota alumni Scientists at Bell Labs 21st-century American women