Jens Edlund

Jens Edlund's research focuses on human speech and how people communicate with each other and with machines. The field is broad, as spoken language, alongside sign language, forms the core of nearly all human activity, and Jens's approach is highly interdisciplinary.

He has explored various aspects of speech, from application research involving dialogue systems, speech recognition, and synthesis to analyses of how people interact using speech as a foundation. This includes factors beyond speech itself, such as breathing, eye contact, gestures, the surrounding context, and the participants' personalities, moods, and objectives.

Currently, Jens leads several distinct projects with a shared emphasis on speech. These projects aim to make vast audiovisual collections more accessible through speech-to-text. For example to create synthetic speech that is proficient in reading long and complex texts with advanced text-to-speech technology, to improve how different research disciplines utilize parliamentary recordings available for over fifty years and to explore how machines that speak can interact with professional drivers to provide support without creating traffic risks. Jens also serves as the director of the national research infrastructure's speech department, Språkbanken Tal.