Ann Syrdal, researcher who helped give computers a female voice, dies at 74

Ann Syrdal, the psychologist and computer science researcher who helped in laying the foundation for modern digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, died on July 24. The American researcher passed away at her home in San Jose, California at the age of 74. As a researcher at AT&T, Ann Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists who had started developing synthetic speech systems in the mid-1980s. Read on to know more about Ann Syrdal’s death.

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Ann Syrdal’s death: What was the cause of the researcher’s death?

According to a report in The New York Times, Syrdal’s daughter Kristen Lasky has confirmed that the cause of the researcher's death was cancer. Ann Kristen Syrdal was born on December 13, 1945, in Minneapolis. Her parents were Richard and Marjorie (Paulson) Syrdal. Richard Syrdal was a physicist and engineer, while her mother was a sales clerk at a Minneapolis department store. Unfortunately, Ann’s father passed away when she was only 2. 

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Ann Syrdal’s impressive Career

When Syrdal enrolled at the University of Minnesota, she had not considered a science career. However, when a psychology professor asked for her help with a lab experiment involving rats, she fell in love with lab work. Thereafter she went on to earn both bachelors and PhD degrees in psychology. She was later hired as a researcher by the Callier Center for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas. 

It was in the early 1980s, that Ann Syrdal began researching the mechanics of human speech. She started her life long work after receiving a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health. Her work even took her to KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

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Working at Bell Labs

The report reveals that when Ann moved to Bell Labs, in New Jersey, she realised that female voice synthesis was not a major area of research anywhere. The male engineers believed that a female voice was just a higher frequency version of the male voice. Hence they didn’t take female speech as seriously.

In 1990s Ann Syrdal joined a project which helped to change the nature of speech synthesis. Instead of generating sounds from scratch, she and her colleagues developed ways of piecing together snippets of recorded human speech and formed new words and new sentences on the fly. Dr Syrdal personally oversaw all the recordings. The first recordings were made with six women. When AT&T’s Natural Voices system topped at an international competition for speech synthesisers in 1998, things started changing. Engineers soon began using female voices. 

13 years down the line in 2011, Apple’s iPhone integrated a female voice called Siri. Both male and female voices were offered as a choice to iPhone users. Tom Gruber who was one of the original Siri Cofounders at Apple stated that they included a female voice because they wanted gender equality. In many countries, including Japan, India and the United States, female voices of Siri became the standard.

Source: Unsplash

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Ann Syrdal’s dramatic personal life

Dr Syrdal went through three divorces in her lifetime. Her marriages to Scot O’Malley, Robert Lasky and Stephen Marcus had ended in divorce. She is survived by her daughter Kristen Lasky, and her partner of 23 years, Alistair Conkie. Conkie was also Syrdal’s co-worker at AT&T. Syrdal also has a son, Sean O’Malley, another daughter, Barbara Evelyn Lasky and eight grandchildren.