Ron Hoory

Ron Hoory is a senior technical staff member responsible for global TTS Research at IBM Research and the speech team lead and strategist at the IBM Israel Research Lab. His expertise and research interests are in the area of speech processing, including speech synthesis, speech recognition and spoken language modeling.

He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. He joined IBM Haifa Research Lab in 1993 and led research and development activities on embedded concatenative text-to-speech, distributed speech recognition, Hebrew speech recognition and very low bit rate speech coding. In 2006 he was appointed group manager. During 2009-2014 he led the research work on text-to-speech and speaker verification within the JDA with Nuance. In 2014 he was appointed Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) and global TTS research lead.

In 2015-2016 he led the research & development of the new Watson TTS Service, and since then has led the global TTS research and transformation of the TTS service to a natural sounding, expressive and conversational TTS based on deep neural networks. From 2019, he has also been co-lead of the DMF Advanced LLM Technologies subtheme Multimodal Speech Models, and a speech co-strategist at IBM Research. In addition, since 2024, he has co-led the development of IBM's Granite speech Multimodal LLM.