AIML - Machine Learning Research (Speech-to-Speech Translation) - TMI

Apple

16h

About The Position

The Machine Translation and Multilingual Intelligence team is developing end-to-end speech-to-speech translation technology that listens, translates, and speaks in a single system, aiming for low latency and natural, expressive output. The role involves applied research and development across modelling, evaluation, and product deployment, with the goal of enabling users to communicate across languages in conversations, calls, and through their devices. The work addresses real-time translation challenges including quality, latency and streaming, natural speech generation, robustness to real-world audio, and evaluation that reflects user experience.

Requirements

• M.S. or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
• Experience with machine learning for speech recognition, machine translation, NLP, or speech synthesis.
• Hands-on experience with deep learning toolkits such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Research or product experience in speech-to-speech or speech-to-text translation, especially end-to-end, streaming, or simultaneous approaches.
• Experience in text-to-speech and speech generation, such as neural TTS, speech tokenizers and audio codecs, or expressive or multilingual synthesis.
• Experience with large language models or multimodal (audio and text) foundation models, including pre-training, fine-tuning, or reinforcement learning.
• Experience designing and deploying real-world, large-scale, user-facing speech recognition, translation, or synthesis systems, including on-device or low-latency inference.
• Familiarity with speech and translation evaluation, such as WER, BLEU/chrF/COMET-style metrics, MOS, side-by-side human evaluation, and latency metrics.
• Ability to formulate a research problem, design and run experiments, and implement solutions in Python and C/C++.
• Excellent spoken and written communication skills.

Nice To Haves

• Publications in relevant venues such as Interspeech, ICASSP, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, or ICML.

Responsibilities

• Conduct independent applied research and development in speech-to-speech translation, from modelling through evaluation and shipping.
• Design, train, and improve large-scale multimodal models combining speech understanding, translation, and speech generation.
• Advance streaming and simultaneous translation while balancing translation quality and latency.
• Improve the quality, naturalness, and expressiveness of translated speech.
• Define and run automatic and human evaluations for speech translation quality, latency, and speech quality.
• Help ship speech-to-speech translation technology to real-world users and enable communication across languages.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time