Internship - Machine Learning Research - Speech-to-Speech Translation

Apple

8d

About The Position

The Machine Translation and Multilingual AI team is seeking research interns to investigate open problems in real-time, natural speech-to-speech translation. The work focuses on the transition from cascaded translation pipelines to end-to-end models that listen, translate, and speak in a single system. Research questions may include simultaneous translation, natural and expressive translated speech, combining speech understanding, translation, and speech generation in large multimodal models, and evaluating these systems.

The intern will own a focused research project, working closely with the team's researchers and engineers. With a mentor, the intern will define a research question, review related work, propose an approach, design and run experiments on large-scale speech and translation models, analyze results, and share findings. The intern will write up the work with the goal of producing a publication or reusable research contribution. Access to large-scale data and compute is provided, and publication at top venues is encouraged.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a PhD or Master's program in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, or a related field.
• Research experience in at least one of speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, NLP, or multimodal learning.
• Hands-on experience with deep learning toolkits such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Excellent spoken and written communication skills.

Nice To Haves

• Research experience in speech-to-speech or speech-to-text translation, especially end-to-end, streaming, or simultaneous approaches.
• Research experience in text-to-speech or speech generation, such as neural TTS, speech tokenizers, audio codecs, or expressive and multilingual synthesis.
• Experience training or fine-tuning large language models or multimodal (audio + text) models.
• Familiarity with speech and translation evaluation, including WER, BLEU/chrF/COMET-style metrics, MOS and human preference studies, and latency metrics.
• Publications at relevant venues such as Interspeech, ICASSP, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.

Responsibilities

• Define a research question with a mentor, review related work, and propose an approach.
• Design and run experiments on large-scale speech and translation models.
• Analyze results rigorously and share findings with the team.
• Write up the work with the goal of a publication or reusable research contribution.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern