What will you learn?
The Speech, Language, and Interactive Systems Technology Track teaches students the theory and technology of building systems that can understand, process, and interact with people using speech and language.  Students can gain a thorough grounding in all aspects of speech, language and interactive systems, including speech signal processing, automatic speech recognition, text-processing, semantic interpretation, dialogue management, speech synthesis, and human-computer interaction.  Students will learn both the theory behind how speech and language is processed, and will gain practical experience in building algorithms and applications.  Students will also gain a solid understanding of machine learning techniques.

Real-world applications
This track will prepare students to research, develop, and deploy speech, language and interactive systems.  Graduates will be able to both build and deploy complete spoken dialogue systems, as well as more specialized applications, such as searching audio files, information retrieval, machine translation, and text summarization.
This program also prepares students to apply speech and language technology in the expanding field of bioscience.  For example speech and language markers can be used to detect neurological disorders, such as autism and dementia.  Other applications include utilizing speech technology to make disarthic speech more intelligible and to detect and assess stuttering severity.

What jobs are available?
SLIST Graduates have gone on to rewarding careers in academic institutions and in leading high-tech companies such as Nuance, Microsoft, Tellme, SVOX, Qualcomm, Google, IBM, SRI, and Intel.  Hundreds of companies around the world are now creating speech and language technology products, and are recruiting engineers who have the expertise that the SLIST Program provides.

Student background
Because SLIST is fundamentally interdisciplinary, we encourage students with a wide range of backgrounds to apply, including students in computer science and engineering, linguistics, neuroscience, mathematics, and psychology, who have completed appropriate prerequisite coursework in computation or mathematics.

About the program
Full time students generally take only 12-15 months (4-5 terms) to complete a master’s degree.  The program can be completed in 2-4 years by students attending on a part-time basis.  Students will graduate with either a masters in Computer Science or in Electrical Engineering. Admissions applications are accepted all year round.

Faculty & Research
The SLIST program is primarily taught by faculty in the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU), one of the world’s premier academic research centers for speech and language technologies. The CSLU faculty also have a depth of industry lab experience in the following organizations; Bell Labs, AT&T Research, Sumitomo Electric Industries, Advanced Telecommunications Research Japan and France Telecom.  Courses are also taught by faculty from the Adaptive Systems Lab (AdSyl).