Isabel Trancoso
Isabel Trancoso is a speech researcher with a long record at Instituto Superior Técnico and INESC-ID in Lisbon. She earned her doctorate in 1987 and launched INESC’s speech processing group in 1990. Her work expanded from speech coding to recognition, synthesis and resources for Portuguese. With collaborators, she studied alignment and recognition of spoken books across European and Brazilian Portuguese. She also served as president of the International Speech Communication Association from 2007 to 2011 and edited a major speech-processing journal.
- Works
- 365
- Citations
- 5,571
- h-index
- 33
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1979–1987
Engineering and speech coding
Trancoso completed electrical and computer engineering degrees at Técnico in 1979, 1984 and 1987. Her early research concerned medium-to-low bit-rate speech coding. She worked at Bell Laboratories during 1984–1985.
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1990
Build a speech research group
She launched the speech processing group at INESC in 1990. The group later became L2F and researched speech recognition and synthesis, with an emphasis on tools and resources for Portuguese.
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2005
Recognize spoken books across varieties
Trancoso and collaborators studied spoken books in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Their paper used a speech recognizer combining neural classifiers and temporal models, and examined the effect of language variety and literary content on alignment and recognition.
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2003–2011
Support the speech research community
She edited IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing during 2003–2005 and served as ISCA president during 2007–2011. She held these service roles alongside research and resource development.
Sources and credits
Photo: Luísa Ferreira, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
