Matt Coler

Matt Coler is an Associate Professor and Director of the MSc Voice Technology program at Campus Fryslân, University of Groningen. His roles include leading research initiatives in language technology, speech synthesis, and low-resource language preservation. He oversees multidisciplinary projects focusing on inclusive speech technology and minority language support, such as the Blizzard Challenge for the Bildts dialect.

His research interests span voice technology (speech analysis, prosody), linguistics (Amazonian/Andean languages, morphology), and cognition (soundscapes, sensory perception). He actively contributes to academic governance, serving on committees for Interspeech and organizing events like the Dutch Speech Tech Day.

Recent work emphasizes multimodal sarcasm detection, Frisian-Dutch bilingual speech analysis, and AI-driven solutions for under-resourced languages. Coler collaborates with industry and academia to advance ethical AI applications in speech technology, advocating for accessibility and linguistic diversity.

He advises students on impactful projects, such as Igor Marchenko’s award-winning research on whispered speech recognition. His lab’s activities include developing tools for speech synthesis, acoustic analysis, and cross-lingual transfer learning.

Coler’s outreach includes public engagement through workshops, conferences, and media. He champions equitable tech practices and has addressed challenges in AI ethics and digital welfare state policies.