Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
The iPRAKTIKUM team is pleased to announce an internship opportunity at a voice recognition company in Toronto to begin immediately. This is a paid opportunity.
SoundHound develops voice recognition technologies and strategies for a variety of contexts that can benefit from voice activation: mobile phones, cars, TVs, music speakers, and every other part of the emerging ‘connected’ world.
SoundHound is looking for someone who loves languages and technology, is proficient in English and is a native, fluent German language speaker. You will help validate voice recordings and contribute phonetic and other linguistic input to train SoundHound’s speech and language models. Example projects include validating speech training data, working on pronunciation dictionaries, phonetic transcriptions, data curation for ASR, and other work required to support the training of all of the models. There also may be project coordination, Unix and Python scripting tasks available to candidates that demonstrate sufficient proficiency (all related to the company’s language and linguistic work). Current work eligibility status and residence in Canada is required.
You Must:
- be eligible to work in Canada and proficient in English
- have native fluency in German (written, verbal and grammar), have completed formal language studies, have a language degree or have a degree in linguistics (or equivalent experience)
- be extremely focused and enjoy completing detailed, repetitive data quality verification tasks daily, at a very high quality level
- be self-motivated with an interest in speech recognition and related emerging technologies
- be flexible and collaborative, but you can also work independently and enjoy taking on new tasks
- be accountable
- take 100% ownership with an extremely high attention to detail and follow through
- be intrigued by language and science, and the possibilities created when these two things meet
It’s Beneficial If You:
- have experience as a data evaluator or have worked with training data for machine learning
- have data curation, data quality or software QA experience
- have Unix, Python or C++ or other programming experience
- have project management/coordination experience
- are experienced with Google Docs, Excel and Jira
- are a music lover and enjoy solving puzzles!
How to apply
Please submit (email attachment in PDF) by April 30:
- a brief cover letter explaining why you are interested in this opportunity
- a current CV highlighting relevant skills,
- your U of T transcript (a copy is sufficient),
- proof of competency in German if this is not already provided by your transcript.
Please name all your documents with “Last Name, First Name_Soundhound_Document Name” (e.g. cover letter, CV, transcript, German competency) and send your complete application to: helena.juenger@utoronto.ca and stefan.soldovieri@utoronto.ca
SoundHound on SoundHound:
“SoundHound Inc. turns sound into understanding and actionable meaning. We believe in enabling humans to interact with the things around them in the same way we interact with each other: by speaking naturally to mobile phones, cars, TVs, music speakers, and every other part of the emerging ‘connected’ world. Our consumer product, Hound, leverages our Speech-to-Meaning™ and Deep Meaning Understanding™ technologies to create a groundbreaking smartphone experience, and is the first product to build on the Houndify platform. Our SoundHound product applies our technology to music, enabling people to discover, explore, and share the music around them, and even find the name of that song stuck in their heads by singing or humming. Through the Houndify platform and Collective AI, we aim to bring voice-enabled AI to everyone and enable others to build on top of it. Our mission: Houndify everything.”
iPRAKTIKUM is an internationalization and experiential learning initiative of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures that is dedicated to connecting U of T students taking German with internships in the GTA and abroad. Regardless of your major field of study, if you are learning German, we want to help you find work-related placements where you can apply what you have learned in the classroom, practice your German, connect with local and global communities, and make valuable connections for your future career path.