PH.D. ALUM DAVE TEEPLE AT NUANCE
Dave Teeple (Ph.D. 2009) is happily employed as a Linguist at Nuance Communications (makers of Dragon Natually Speaking software, among other things), in the Creative Development department. Dave writes: I’m helping to design text-to-speech systems for clients who shall remain unnamed. This involves, among other tasks, pursuing research related to improving pitch contour synthesis, so that one day HAL will say, as naturally as any human, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” At that point, Dave will be superfluous, and HAL will start engineering humans to talk more like it does. Until it too becomes superfluous and is discarded. At some point they hope to have brought these mutual improvements to the point where a single highly expressive hand gesture will suffice for all human-computer communications.