PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Rolf Carlson

Rolf Carlson is a speech technology researcher whose work spans text-to-speech systems and spoken dialogue. He joined KTH's research staff in 1969 and held research posts at MIT in 1978/79 and 1990/91. His work includes KTH speech synthesis, a 1991 paper on KTH research, and dialogue systems such as Waxholm, August and Higgins. By 2004, he served on the International Speech Communication Association board. In November 2004, he was a professor in Speech Technology at KTH's Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics.

Born
1945
Works
183
Citations
1,593
h-index
23
Badges

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

Timeline

  1. 1969–1991

    Research staff at KTH and MIT

    He joins the research staff at KTH in 1969 and works as a research staff member at MIT in 1978/79 and 1990/91.

  2. 1989

    Testing KTH text-to-speech

    He and Björn Granström evaluate the segmental quality of the KTH text-to-speech system with a nonsense VCV test in 1989.

  3. 1990

    Voice modelling in synthesis

    In 1990, he coauthors a study with Björn Granström and Inger Karlsson on voice modelling in speech synthesis.

  4. 1991

    Research and development at KTH

    He authors 'Some Notes About Research and Development at KTH' for the 1991 Speech and Natural Language workshop.

  5. 1995

    Dialog management in Waxholm

    In 1995, he coauthors a description of Waxholm's natural-language and dialogue components; its STINA parser uses a probabilistic language model.

  6. By 2004

    ISCA board service

    By 2004, he serves on the International Speech Communication Association board.

  7. 2004

    Higgins and error handling

    In 2004, he coauthors a paper on Higgins, a spoken-dialogue project that studies error handling through pedestrian navigation and guiding.

  8. November 2004

    Professor in Speech Technology

    In November 2004, he presents KTH's multimodal dialogue research as a professor in Speech Technology at the Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics, and he is a developer of August, a Swedish multimodal dialogue system at CTT.

Career

  1. 1978–1991Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyResearch staff member
  2. 1969–2012KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyResearch staff member

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Two-formant Models, Pitch and Vowel Perception1975 · Elsevier eBooks · 128 citationsWith Björn Granström
  2. Adapt - a multimodal conversational dialogue system in an apartment domain2000 · International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) · 76 citationsWith Björn Granström and David House
  3. A multi-language text-to-speech module2005 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 66 citationsWith Björn Granström
  4. A cross-cultural comparison of american, Palestinian, and Swedish perception of charismatic speech2008 · Speech prosody · 64 citationsWith Julia Hirschberg
  5. Experiments with emotive speech - acted utterances and synthesized replicas1992 · International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) · 60 citationsWith Björn Granström

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  3. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Rolf Carlson yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. MultiModal Dialogue Systems and Other Research Projects at KTH cs.columbia.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Evaluation and development of the KTH text-to-speech system on the segmental level isca-archive.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Experiments with voice modelling in speech synthesis isca-archive.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Some Notes About Research and Development at KTH aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Dialog management in the Waxholm system isca-archive.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. NLP Group Alternate-Thursday Meetings: Previous Talks and Slides 2004-5 cs.columbia.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Higgins - a spoken dialogue system for investigating error handling techniques isca-archive.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. A list of spoken language interfaces cs.cmu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.