Tony Robinson is a researcher in the application of

recurrent neural network Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a class of artificial neural networks designed for processing sequential data, such as text, speech, and time series, where the order of elements is important. Unlike feedforward neural networks, which proces ...

s to

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

, being one of the first to discover the practical capabilities of deep neural networks and its application to speech recognition.

Education and Early Career

Robinson studied natural sciences at

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

between 1981 and 1984, where he specialized in physics. He went on to complete an MPhil in computer speech and language processing in 1985 and continued with a PhD in the same area in 1989, both at Cambridge. He first published on the topic of speech recognition during his PhD and has published over a hundred widely cited research papers on automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the years since.

Entrepreneurial Career

In 1995, Robinson formed SoftSound Ltd, a speech technology company which was acquired by

Autonomy In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be ...

with a view to using the technology to make unstructured video and voice data easily searchable. Robinson helped build the fastest large vocabulary speech recognition system available at the time, and operating in more languages than any other model, based on recurrent neural networks. From 2008 to 2010, Robinson was the Director of the Advanced Speech Group at SpinVox, a provider of speech-to-text conversion services for carrier markets, including wireless, VoIP and cable. Their Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system was, for a time, being used more than one million times per day and SpinVox was subsequently acquired by global speech technology company Nuance. Robinson was also founder of Speechmatics, which launched its cloud-based speech recognition services in 2012. Speechmatics subsequently announced a new technology in accelerated new language modeling late in 2017. Robinson continues to publish papers in speech recognition technology, especially in the area of statistical language modelling.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robinson, Tony Living people Year of birth missing (living people) British computer scientists Alumni of the University of Cambridge British businesspeople Natural language processing researchers