"Key Advances in Speech Technology in the Last Five Years" Joseph "Yossi" Keshet, Technion — NNCI Summer Speaker Series

Join us for an in-person Summer Speaker Series event featuring Joseph "Yossi" Keshet, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Technion.

Co-Sponsored by Cognitive Science Program and Department of Linguistics

A light lunch will be provided at the talk. 

Title: Key Advances in Speech Technology in the Last Five Years

Abstract:

This talk will provide an overview of the major advances in speech technology over the past five years, focusing on three main areas. First, I will discuss automatic speech recognition (ASR), describing the architectures underlying modern systems, their current performance, and the key challenges that remain. Second, I will cover recent developments in speech synthesis, introducing diffusion-based generative models for text-to-speech synthesis, explaining their underlying principles, and discussing their capabilities, limitations, and open research questions. Finally, I will explore the interplay between speech AI and speech science, examining how modern AI models can contribute to our understanding of speech production and perception, and how insights from speech science can, in turn, improve the interpretability and development of these models.

The presentation is intended to be accessible and interactive rather than highly technical. Questions and discussion are encouraged throughout the talk.

Bio:

Joseph (Yossi) Keshet received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1994 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, in 2008. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with EPFL and the IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Research Assistant Professor with the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), Chicago, IL, USA. Between 2013 and 2022, he was an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Since 2022, he has been an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. His research interests include speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech processing.

Dr. Keshet is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and as an Associate Editor, Senior Area Editor, and currently Deputy Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. He was elected as a Distinguished Lecturer of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) for 2026–2027.

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