My first degree was in A.I. back in the 1980s at Sussex University. Back then, at Sussex, the A.I degree was in the School of Social Sciences and figures such as Aaron Sloman and Maggie Boden with philosophy and humanities backgrounds meant the course had a big input from psychology and cognitive philosophy. I like the world of ideas but I found wrestling with notions which seemed very divorced from the applied reality of computing frustrating. When I entered the speech world in 1994, when I took the wonderful MSc course at Edinburgh University in Speech and Language Processing, I found a mixture of the applied and the unknown which suited me very well.

Speech is just there. It is not a theoretical construct, it is not blocks world, it is not even defined by the invention of writing. Either recognising or producing speech artificially is a concrete task. But it is also a very challenging one, because speech is not just a means of communication. It is part of what we are as humans, it betrays our background, our motivations, it communicates our emotions, it is part of social life and part of our human experience. We can manipulate speech to lie, to love, to attack and to support. Thus, when we enter the world of speech we are entering a human world which is far removed from GUIs, and computer systems. To build systems that can interact in this human context is a fascinating engineering problem that encompasses digital signal processing right through to the social sciences.

My research interests across this theme are quite eclectic and looking at my publications on scholar is quite a good way of understanding the breadth of my interests. At present the area I’m most focused on is conversational interaction.

Dr Matthew Aylett is a leading international expert in speech synthesis and conversational interaction. He co-founded CereProc Ltd. in 2006, a successful international speech synthesis company which specialised in expressive and emotional speech generation.

Matthew was CTO of CereProc from 2006-2013 where he was responsible for setting up, managing and directing the technical team. He was awarded a Royal Society Fellowship in 2012 to work on personification within speech synthesis. In 2013, as part of senior team of researcher, he successfully secured £1.4m for the multi-site ReelLives EPSRC project focusing on converting personal digital data into a filmic output and, in 2014, as Chief Science Officer at CereProc secured €2.9m for the multi-site ARIA project focusing on affective information retrieval.

He joined Heriot-Watt Univesity in 2023 as an Associate Professor and is currently activley researching the use of conversational interaction in areas as diverse as respiratory screening and self directed learning.

He has published widely in speech synthesis and conversational interaction both academically, and in popular science, contributing to articles in the Daily Telegraph, Science in Parliament etc. He has significant media experience appearing on Good Morning America and the UK Gadget show as well as carrying out many interviews for the UK national and international media. Dr Aylett believes that technology can act as a key means for helping us understand and make sense of the world.

Associate Executive Dean for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. My aim is to improve MACS engagement and collaboration with industry and commercial organisations.

Computer Science, Interaction Theme Convener. I am responsible for liaising between third parties and academics within MACS who work in the Interaction Lab and the Futures group.