Dr. Ann K. Syrdal, a leading researcher in the interdisciplinary field of speech synthesis who developed the first natural-sounding female synthetic voice and paved the way for now-ubiquitous speech technologies like Siri and Alexa, died on July 24, 2020 at her home in San Jose. She was 74.
At AT&T Bell Laboratories (later AT&T Labs-Research), where she worked from 1986 until her retirement in 2012, Ann researched and developed text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. Examples of TTS include digital personal assistants, like Siri and Alexa, in addition to hands- and eyes-free navigation, educational apps for reading, writing, and language acquisition, screen reading for people with visual impairments, and speech communication for the vocally impaired. During her time at AT&T, Ann secured 51 patents and in 2008 was inducted as a Fellow to the American Acoustical Society “for contributions to female speech synthesis.”
Ann saw beyond the limitations of existing speech research and envisioned new ways of improving the analysis and modeling of speech, male and female. Her approach to speech analysis and synthesis revolutionized not only the quality but also the inclusivity and reach of speech technology. Among her many innovations, she was best known for her work on developing the first high-quality female synthetic voice and also for creating the first high-quality African-American male synthetic voice.
Biographical Details
Ann Kristen Syrdal was born on December 13, 1945, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Richard Syrdal and Marjorie Freeberg (née Paulson). Marjorie Paulson was working at Honeywell in Minneapolis as a secretary when she met Richard Syrdal, a promising young physicist who was developing aviation technologies for the company. The two were described by Ellen Erdahl (the daughter of Richard’s cousin) as “a very special couple,” and they fell in love instantly and were married. Ann, their only child, was born to them soon after; however, Richard Syrdal died when Ann was only two years old. After that, Marjorie raised Ann alone, with considerable hardship during a time when single mothers were discriminated against for housing and loans, and supported the family by working in the jewelry department of Hudson’s Department Store in Minneapolis. The family gained some stability when Marjorie eventually remarried Glenn Freeberg of Northfield, Minnesota, and the newly reconstituted family moved into a modest single-family home in South Minneapolis.
The difficulties of Ann’s childhood did not hinder her academic success; however, narrow expectations for women - and especially mothers - almost did. From an early age, her intelligence revealed itself, even to her classmates who teased her with an affectionate refrain: “Ann Syrdal an-swered-all the questions” (hyphens added to emphasize the word play). Though she was a strong math and science student, Ann recalled her high school math teacher discouraging her from taking higher-level math classes because she was a girl: “Why bother learning calculus?” he asked.
Fortunately, Ann ignored the advice of her math teacher and went on to obtain her BA and PhD degrees in Psychology from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Cognitive Sciences. Even though she was a promising young scientist, Ann was nearly denied a doctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota explicitly because of her sex. Although the faculty agreed Ann was the most deserving candidate, they also were concerned that the fellowship would be wasted on a woman who would likely give up her career after getting married and having children. At this point and perhaps unknown to many faculty, Ann, divorced from her first husband, Scot O’Malley, already had a young son, Sean O’Malley. The faculty ultimately awarded her the fellowship, which gave Ann the opportunity to travel to Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut and to study with speech research pioneer Alvin Liberman.
As her professors at Minnesota feared, Ann was soon remarried to a fellow Psychology graduate student, Robert Lasky, and had more children - two daughters, Kristen Lasky and Barbara Evelyn Lasky. And for a time, Ann did put aside her career to raise her three children. During these years, she followed her second husband to his research and academic positions in Guatemala and Santa Barbara, California. While caring for her three young children, she also managed to finish her dissertation, earn her PhD, and publish several well-received early papers based on her doctoral research on the categorical perception by infants. But Ann’s domestic role also allowed her to nurture many of her artistic, botanical, and culinary interests, which became her primary leisure activities throughout her adult life.
When Ann returned to full-time work, she joined the faculty of The Callier Center for Communication Disorders at The University of Texas at Dallas (UT-Dallas). There, her research on speech perception landed her a prestigious five-year National Institutes of Health Research Career Development Award, which gave her the opportunity to work with legendary speech researchers like Gunnar Fant of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and Ken Stevens of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of whom have since been praised for their mentorship and championing of female researchers like Ann. While this period was the most intellectually stimulating of her life, it was also personally tumultuous and ended in divorce from her second husband.
In 1986, with UT-Dallas graduate student H.S. Gopal, Ann published her seminal work on speech perception, an article titled, “A perceptual model of vowel recognition based on the auditory representation of American English vowels.” In this paper, which is her most-cited and which reports on the research she herself regarded as her finest, she and Gopal demonstrated that one could reliably and scientifically identify vowel sounds from acoustic data, regardless of the inevitable variability among individual voices. Going forward, the insights from this study would enable her to make great leaps in the development of natural-sounding synthetic voices, including the female voice that she would begin to work on in the 1990s.
Also in 1986, Ann joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Naperville, Illinois as a Member of Technical Staff and was quickly promoted to Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, the highest rank of scientific and engineering staff in the world-renowned institution. There she met her third husband, Stephen Marcus, and worked with him and others on many aspects of speech technology, including TTS. She also found time to edit the textbook, Applied Speech Technology, with Raymond W. Bennett and Steven L. Greenspan. In the early 1990's, Ann and her third husband moved to work for AT&T Technologies in Holmdel, New Jersey. They later divorced.
In 1996, AT&T Labs - Research (later renamed AT&T Shannon Laboratories) in Florham Park, New Jersey, was created as the research division of the post-deregulation, post-trivestiture AT&T Corporation and became the incubator for many influential projects. One of these projects was to develop a natural-sounding TTS system using recently developed techniques. A number of researchers were recruited to staff the TTS project; Ann was one of the first. Another was fellow researcher Alistair Conkie, who became her professional and life partner and with whom she published many papers and secured multiple patents.
Toward the end of her time at Shannon Labs, Ann served as Chair for an ANSI-accredited Standards Committee Working Group, which developed global standards for the evaluation of the intelligibility of TTS systems.
Ann’s career at AT&T flourished because of the opportunities she had to collaborate with outstanding colleagues from around the world and because of the encouragement and promotion by yet another great in the field of speech technology, Larry Rabiner. She, in turn, found fulfillment in mentoring young scientists and engineers, especially young women, many of whom now have impressive careers of their own.
In 2012, Ann officially retired from AT&T and resumed her lifelong hobbies of painting, fiber arts, gardening, and cooking. Still, she continued to attend international academic conferences with Alistair Conkie, and moved with him to Silicon Valley in 2014 when he took a position at Apple Inc.
Shortly after the move, Ann was diagnosed with cancer of the bile duct. Despite undergoing a series of challenging surgeries and treatments, she was able to live an active and engaged life for many years in her new home of San Jose. During this period, she renewed relationships with many colleagues and friends from various stages of her life, and she made new friends by joining a book club and serving on the Landscape Committee in her community. She also kept an enviable container garden on the front and back decks of her San Jose townhome. In addition, she took a variety of watercolor classes and painted hundreds of impressive watercolors, most notably her portraits of her grandchildren, which lovingly captured their likenesses and personalities.
Her greatest pleasure in life was spending time with and playing an important role to her family. She provided support and assistance to her children through critical periods of their lives, travelled with Alistair to his native Scotland (and beyond), and excelled at being a grandparent, especially in retirement and even after her cancer diagnosis. She made great efforts to be present for sick days, birthdays, Grandparents Days at schools, concerts, and graduations, and took several grandchildren on very special overseas trips.
Ann was also a philanthropist who contributed to a variety of causes and nonprofits, and she was a long-time listener/viewer and supporter of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. In lieu of sending flowers, please consider contributing to your local public media stations, or to Ann’s favorite radio station, WNYC.
Ann will be laid to rest in Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, beside her late mother (Marjorie Freeberg) and father (Richard Syrdal). She leaves behind her devoted partner of twenty-three years, Alistair Conkie. She is also survived by her son, Sean O’Malley (Karen Bershtein); her daughters, Kristen Lasky (Graham Barr), and Barbara Evelyn Lasky; and eight grandchildren.
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty,
to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has
breathed easier
because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
-UNKNOWN
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