Gábor Olaszy

From 1974 to 2006, he worked as an engineer-researcher at the Phonetics Laboratory of the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was involved in speech research and instrumental speech analysis. By 1980, he and his colleagues had developed the first Hungarian text-to-speech computer process, which produced continuous machine speech; in 1982, he received patent protection with the title: "Method and apparatus for controlling synthesizer(s) without a dictionary, for producing synthesized speech quasi-simultaneously with the control".

From 1983, he worked part-time at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (VIK) of BME in the speech research group of Géza Gordos at the Department of Telecommunications and Telematics (TTT), and then at its successor organization, the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics (TMIT). His task was the research and development of the machine production of Hungarian speech, following current computer science and linguistic methods. His first book on this subject was published in 1989, entitled “Electronic Speech Production”. He has been working at BME TMIT as a professor emeritus since 2018.

His research areas include: research into the acoustic structure of speech, acoustic-phonetic modeling of speech, methodology of machine speech production, design of speech synthesizers, development of speech databases for research and education.

He received his PhD in linguistics in 1989. He has been a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2003.

He has written 210 scientific publications on the results of his research, including six books. His name is listed as a co-author on seven Hungarian patents.

Voting member of the Telecommunications Scientific Committee, secretary of the Acoustic Complex Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2003 between 2002-2018. Elected member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Speech Technology.

His awards include: Kempelen Farkas Prize (Communications and Informatics Scientific Association, NJSZT and the Optical, Acoustic and Film Technology Association, 1993); Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (2004); Kozma László Memorial Medal (BME VIK, 2011).