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Ann Kristen Syrdal (December 13, 1945July 24, 2020) was an American psychologist and computer science researcher who worked with speech synthesis technology. She developed the first female-sounding voice synthesizer.


Early life

Syrdal was born on December 13, 1945, in Minneapolis. Her father, Richard, was a physicist and engineer; her mother, Marjorie () was a sales clerk. She was raised by her mother after her father died when she was two years old.


Career

Syrdal became interested in psychology after helping with laboratory experiments involving rats, and subsequently completed a
bachelor A bachelor is a man who is not and has never been married.Bachelors are, in Pitt & al.'s phrasing, "men who live independently, outside of their parents' home and other institutional settings, who are neither married nor cohabitating". (). Etymo ...
and then PhD degree in psychology. After receiving her PhD, she began research work at the University of Texas at Dallas's Callier Center for Communication Disorders. In the early 1980s she received a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, and began studying the mechanics of
human speech Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are ...
at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After the grant ended, Syrdal took a job at
AT&T Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
. At the time, synthesized voices were primarily male. In 1990 she developed a system that could generate a female voice. In the 1990s she joined a project that developed a new method of speech synthesis; instead of creating the sounds artificially, the synthesis joined fragments of recorded speech to create new words and sentences. Sydral oversaw the initial recordings, of six women's voices. In 1998, AT&T's "Natural Voices" system won an international competition for speech synthesizers, using a female voice. She was named a fellow of the
Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary orga ...
in 2008, for her work in female speech synthesis. Syrdal died of cancer on July 24, 2020, in San Jose, California.


Personal life

Syrdal married and divorced three times; at the time of her death she had been in a domestic partnership for 23 years. She had three children, a son and two daughters.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Syrdal, Ann 1945 births 2020 deaths American women psychologists American psychologists Deaths from cancer in California Fellows of the Acoustical Society of America Human–computer interaction researchers Scientists from Minneapolis University of Minnesota alumni Scientists at Bell Labs 21st-century American women