Research Intern, Speech Processing

Overview

Research Internships at Microsoft offer a dynamic setting for research careers, with world-class research labs led by globally recognized scientists and engineers. They pursue innovation across many scientific and technical disciplines, including computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.

Speech and audio AI is one of the key drivers of natural user interfaces built on spoken language. The Speech and Audio Group develops core speech technologies that help millions of users achieve more. The group works across signal processing, speech recognition, speech translation, and speech and audio generation to deliver robust, natural, and scalable speech experiences across many scenarios and languages.

Microsoft is seeking Research Interns to contribute to pioneering research in speech and audio, including end-to-end speech recognition and translation, speech and audio generation, and multimodal work with Large Language Models (LLM). Research Interns will conduct fundamental and applied research alongside researchers and scientists, and will have the chance to prototype, demonstrate, and publish their findings.

Responsibilities

Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice, working alongside doctoral candidates and leading researchers. During the 12-week internship, interns are paired with mentors, collaborate with other interns and researchers, present findings, and take part in the life of the research community. Internships are offered year-round, though they typically begin in the summer.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a Doctorate Degree program in speech recognition, speech translation, separation and enhancement, speaker recognition and diarization, speech and audio generation, audio processing, deep learning, machine learning, AI, or a related field.

Other Requirements

• Research Interns must be physically located at their manager's Microsoft worksite for the duration of the internship.
• Applicants must submit at least two reference letters, a cover letter, and any relevant work or research samples. Reference letters can be requested only after the application is submitted, and may not be requested for every candidate. Letter writers may want to be alerted in advance.

Preferred Qualifications

• 1+ year of research experience in speech recognition, speech translation, speech and audio generation, speech LLM, deep learning, machine learning, AI, or a related field.
• Experience with open-source tools such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Publications in top-tier conferences or journals in related fields (e.g., ICASSP, Interspeech, ASRU, SLT, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Speech Communication, Computer Speech and Language).
• Demonstrated communication and writing skills.