Paavo Alku

Paavo Alku is a Finnish speech researcher whose work on the human voice source reaches into speech synthesis and the detection of disease from speech. Degrees at Helsinki University of Technology between 1986 and 1992 and a 1991 paper on PSIAIF glottal wave analysis came before posts in Bangkok in 1993 and Turku from 1994 to 1999. Glottal speech synthesis followed, with an HMM-based Finnish text-to-speech system in 2008 and the GlottDNN vocoder in 2016, both coauthored by him. He served as an Academy Professor appointed by the Academy of Finland in 2015–2019 and became a Fellow of IEEE and of ISCA in 2020, the first Finnish speech researcher with the ISCA title. At Aalto University, he is a professor of speech communication technology, and in 2025 he coauthored a paper on robust heart failure detection in digital telephony environments.

Now at: Aalto University
Born: 1960
Works: 571
Citations: 16,369
h-index: 64
Badges: Loyal

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

1986–1992

Degrees at Helsinki University of Technology

He earns an M.Sc. in 1986, a Lic.Tech. in 1988 and a Dr.Sc.(Tech) in 1992, all at Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo.
1991

Glottal wave analysis with PSIAIF

In 1991, he presents Pitch Synchronous Iterative Adaptive Inverse Filtering (PSIAIF) at Eurospeech. The method analyzes the glottal wave and builds on the earlier Iterative Adaptive Inverse Filtering (IAIF) technique.
1993–1999

Posts in Bangkok and Turku

He is an assistant professor at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1993. From 1994 to 1999, he is an assistant professor and professor at the University of Turku in Finland.
2008

HMM-based Finnish speech synthesis

With Tuomo Raitio, Antti Suni, Hannu Pulakka and Martti Vainio, he coauthors an HMM-based Finnish text-to-speech system in 2008. The system uses glottal inverse filtering to generate natural-sounding synthetic speech.
2015–2019

An Academy Professorship

He serves as an Academy Professor assigned by the Academy of Finland in 2015–2019. His research results are adopted in mobile phones and in many neuroscientific studies of speech processing in the human brain.
2016

The GlottDNN vocoder

In 2016, he coauthors GlottDNN with Manu Airaksinen, Bajibabu Bollepalli, Lauri Juvela, Zhizheng Wu and Simon King. The glottal vocoder for statistical parametric speech synthesis combines a more accurate glottal inverse filtering method with deep-neural-network generation of glottal excitation, and the paper wins the ISCA award for the best student paper of Interspeech 2016.
2020

Fellow of IEEE and ISCA

IEEE elevates him to Fellow as of January 2020 for contributions to analysis, synthesis and quality improvement of speech signals. In 2020, the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) also names him a Fellow for contributions in voice source analysis and its applications, and he is the first Finnish speech researcher to receive the title.
As of October 2026

Professor at Aalto University

He is a professor of speech communication technology at Aalto University in Espoo. In 2025, he coauthors a Speech Communication paper on robust heart failure detection in digital telephony environments with transformer-based codec inversion.