Carol Espy-Wilson

Timeline

1. 1979–1987

   An acoustic-phonetic thesis

   She earns a bachelor's degree from Stanford in 1979 and a doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT in 1987. Her dissertation is titled An Acoustic-Phonetic Approach to Speech Recognition: Application to the Semivowels.

2. 1990–2001

   From Boston University to Maryland

   She joins the Boston University faculty in 1990. In 2001 she makes the move to the University of Maryland, College Park.

3. 2008–2009

   A Radcliffe fellowship

   She is a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard in 2008–2009. During the fellowship year she plans to focus on the noise robustness of a probabilistic landmark-based speech-recognition system.

4. 2009–2014

   Founding OmniSpeech

   UMD's Venture Accelerator program urges her into entrepreneurship in 2009. In 2014 she founds OmniSpeech to turn years of research in speech communication and noise suppression into practical tools.

5. 2018–2022

   ISCA and IEEE fellowships

   The International Speech Communication Association names her an ISCA Fellow in 2018 for contributions to speech acoustic modelling, speech signal processing, and applications to knowledge-driven speech recognition and speech enhancement. The IEEE elevates her to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2022.

6. 2021

   A speech inversion keynote

   In June 2021 she gives the keynote at the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, presenting a speech inversion system based on machine learning technology.

7. 2026

   AI Detect for deepfake voices

   OmniSpeech's AI Detect product debuts at CES 2026. The product is a real-time voice deepfake detection tool, now available in the Zoom App Marketplace.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor at Maryland

   She is a professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland. Her research combines linguistics and machine learning with speech production, speech recognition and speech enhancement.