Simon King

Simon King is a Professor of Speech Processing at the University of Edinburgh, affiliated with the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. He serves as Director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) and teaches courses like Speech Processing and Speech Synthesis, while directing the MSc in Speech and Language Processing.

Research Interests

His research focuses on:

• Developing new acoustic models (e.g., Linear Dynamical Models, factorial-HMMs) for speech recognition
• Advancing unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis
• Integrating articulatory measurement data for enhanced modeling
• Exploring perceptual measures in synthesis criteria
• Building multilingual speech systems to identify universal speech building blocks

Publication Trends

Simon's recent work emphasizes deep learning (DNNs, LSTMs) in speech synthesis, multilingual frameworks, and articulatory-acoustic feature integration. His studies often bridge grapheme-based modeling, perceptual error reduction, and noise-robust synthesis.

Scientific Awards

• EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (2005-2009)

Students & Collaborations

He has supervised numerous PhD students including Rasmus Dall, Tom Merritt, and Srikanth Ronanki. Current research fellows like Mirjam Wester and Zhizheng Wu contribute to projects such as Natural Speech Technology (NST) and Simple4All.