Also called: Speech Recognition Engineer, Voice AI Engineer, Text-to-Speech Engineer, ASR Engineer
Builds the AI that turns speech into text and text into natural-sounding voices, for assistants, captions and call centers.
You test why your speech recognizer stumbles on a strong regional accent, gather more examples, and retrain. In the afternoon you listen to new synthetic voices with the team and score which sounds most natural.
Estimate; AI companies and big tech pay the most.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Master's degree, about 6 years after high school. Bachelor's in computer science or electrical engineering; most have a master's or PhD in speech or language AI.
Ways in: 4-year college, Graduate school. Training cost: $60k – $150k.
Majors to look at: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computational Linguistics.
Growing much faster than average (about 10% over 10 years). BLS projects +10% for software developers, 2025-35; voice AI is spreading to cars, phones and customer service.
Medium risk for 10 years. Big general-purpose models absorb some speech tasks; data work, testing on real voices and product judgment stay human.
Classes: AP Computer Science A, AP Calculus, Physics, A second language.
Official data: O*NET occupation 15-1252.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.