OFAI welcomes Lorenz Gutscher and Victor García, who will be serving as visiting researchers on the Vokquant project, coordinated by Felicitas Kleber (Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Munich), Michael Pucher (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) and Stephan Schmid (Phonetics Laboratory, University of Zurich).
Lorenz Gutscher joins us from the Acoustics Research Institute (ÖAW), where he started his PhD in the field of speech synthesis with a special emphasis on Standard Austrian German and Austrian Dialects. The Vokquant project moved to OFAI in August, together with Michael Pucher and Lorenz Gutscher. Lorenz Gutscher is currently building a synthetic voice of Austrian Varieties including a Viennese Dialect and is investigating speaker embeddings as well as interpolations between regional standard varieties from Austria, Germany, and Swiss.
Victor García is currently pursuing his PhD studies in the field of speech synthesis at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). His role at Vokquant project is building a multilingual synthesizer which includes, among others, the Austrian varieties. He will explore the use of speaker embeddings and style tokens to improve the training efficiency and the scalability of current methodologies.
