OFAI welcomes Michael Pucher, who will be project manager of the Vokquant project where methods for dialect speech synthesis will be investigated.
Michael Pucher is currently also Senior Speech Technologist at Recognosco and Adjunct Professor (Priv.-Doz.) at Graz University of Technology.
His broad research interests include many topics of speech communication such as acoustic modeling for speech recognition, semantic language modeling, speech synthesis for language varieties, persona design for speech-based systems, multimodal and spoken dialog systems, audio-visual speech synthesis, synthesis of singing, synthesis of animal vocalisations, digital phonetics, and sociophonetics. He has also made significant contributions in the area of speaker verification spoofing, where he showed how adaptive synthesizers can spoof a speaker verification system.
Recently Michael Pucher also developed a synthetic voice of a famous deceased Austrian actor ("Othmar Wörner") for the Burgtheater Wien production Keine Menschenseele.
