PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Simon King

Simon King is a University of Edinburgh speech researcher whose AI work spans automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. He earned degrees at Cambridge and Edinburgh and moved through research posts to a professorship at Edinburgh. His work uses speech-production knowledge in speech recognition and includes the GlottDNN vocoder and a natural-language-guided speech language model for text-to-speech. ISCA named him a Fellow in 2018. As of October 2026, he is Professor of Speech Processing at Edinburgh, directs CSTR and leads a Royal Academy of Engineering project on speech deepfakes.

Works
435
Citations
11,814
h-index
47
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1992–1998

    Degrees at Cambridge and Edinburgh

    He earns a first-class M.A. at Cambridge in 1992, an M.Phil. there in 1993, and a Ph.D. at Edinburgh in 1998.

  2. 1996–2010

    From Bonn to Edinburgh

    He works as a research assistant at the University of Bonn in 1996 and as a research assistant/research fellow at Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research from 1997 to 2000. He becomes a lecturer in 2000, a reader in 2007, and a full professor in 2010.

  3. 2007

    Speech production in recognition

    In 2007, he coauthors a survey of how speech-production representations can improve automatic speech recognition. The article explains how those representations account for speech phenomena that acoustic signals or phonetic transcripts alone cannot easily analyze.

  4. February 2011

    Directing CSTR

    In February 2011, he becomes director of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR), a research centre in speech technology that includes speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition.

  5. 2016

    GlottDNN and a speech award

    He coauthors GlottDNN, a full-band glottal vocoder evaluated within a deep-neural-network text-to-speech system. The team wins ISCA's best student paper award at Interspeech 2016.

  6. 2018

    An ISCA Fellowship

    ISCA names him a Fellow in 2018.

  7. 2024

    Natural-language-guided speech synthesis

    His 2024 paper with Dan Lyth proposes a scalable way to label speaker identity, style, and recording conditions. They use the method on a 45,000-hour dataset to train a speech language model for high-fidelity text-to-speech.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor and project lead

    He is Professor of Speech Processing at the University of Edinburgh and directs CSTR. He leads the Royal Academy of Engineering's active Explainable Acoustic Profiles of Speech Deepfakes project from October 2026 through September 2028.

Career

  1. Since 1997University of EdinburghResearch Assistant / Research Fellow, Lecturer
  2. 2009–2017Friedrich Schiller University Jena
  3. 2004–2006University of California, Berkeley
  4. 2000–2005TU Darmstadt
  5. 1996University of BonnResearch Assistant

Education

  1. 1998University of EdinburghPh.D.
  2. 1993University of CambridgeM.Phil.
  3. 1992University of CambridgeM.A.

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

Most-cited works

  1. The voice bank corpus: Design, collection and data analysis of a large regional accent speech database2013 · International Conference Oriental COCOSDA held jointly with Conference on Asian Spoken Language Research and Evaluation · 419 citations
  2. An Overview of Voice Conversion and Its Challenges: From Statistical Modeling to Deep Learning2020 · IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing · 359 citationsWith Haizhou Li
  3. Merlin: An Open Source Neural Network Speech Synthesis System2016 · 303 citations
  4. Deep neural networks employing Multi-Task Learning and stacked bottleneck features for speech synthesis2015 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 242 citations
  5. Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2015 IEEE International Conference on2015 · 218 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Simon King. 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.
  2. Universities had a net outflow of 2,068 moves in AI careersIncludes University of Edinburgh. Our estimates of career flows and median h-index across universities and companies in AI, including the role of joint appointments and earlier academic jobs.
  3. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes University of Edinburgh. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Edinburgh. 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 with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Simon King - University of Edinburgh Research Explorer research.ed.ac.uk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Simon King publications cstr.ed.ac.uk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. GlottDNN - A full-band glottal vocoder for statistical parametric speech synthesis - University of Edinburgh Research Explorer research.ed.ac.uk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. ISCA Award for the best student paper of Interspeech 2016 - Aalto University's Research Portal research.aalto.fi. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. [2402.01912] Natural language guidance of high-fidelity text-to-speech with synthetic annotations arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. About - Speech Zone speech.zone. Checked 20 October 2026.