Research Intern - Speech AI

About this role

About the role: - Join the Computational Intelligence Lab within IISc's Department of Aerospace Engineering for a 3–6 month research internship. - The project focuses on speech AI systems designed for English and Indic-language users in India. - The research goal is to create efficient TTS and STT models that can operate directly on commonly available devices. - The team aims to support offline and low-cost speech applications without depending on high-end hardware or fast connectivity. What you'll work on: - Develop and adapt speech-recognition, speech-synthesis or speech-understanding models. - Fine-tune architectures such as Whisper, Wav2Vec2, IndicConformer or comparable speech models. - Collect, clean and prepare custom audio datasets for model development. - Work with speech data in English, Indic languages or both. - Optimize models for deployment on devices such as smartphones, Raspberry Pi or Jetson Nano. - Apply compression and deployment techniques including quantization, pruning, ONNX or TFLite. - Take ownership of the workflow from raw speech data through to a functioning on-device model. What we're looking for: - Hands-on experience fine-tuning ASR, TTS or speech-understanding systems is expected. - Candidates should have practical experience preparing custom audio datasets. - Prior model deployment on edge hardware is important for the role. - Applicants should be capable of working independently and driving a research project end to end. Good to have: - Experience with low-resource languages is a plus. - Work involving code-mixed speech such as Hinglish or Tanglish is beneficial. - Experience with real-time or streaming inference is also valued. - Relevant side projects are acceptable evidence of practical experience. How to apply: - Submit your application through the provided link. Note: Internship duration is 3–6 months. Candidates with relevant speech AI side projects are encouraged to apply.