About

Hello, welcome to my website. I am Esther Klabbers and I have been a research scientist working in speech synthesis for many years. My background is a mix of linguistics, phonetics, prosody, and machine learning. I have worked in both academia and industry. I was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU) at OHSU in Portland, Oregon and after that I worked at ReadSpeaker as a Senior Research Scientist, first in the Netherlands and then back in the United States.

I am on the board of ISCA, the International Speech Communication Association, and in 2025 I will be Technical Program Chair of Interspeech 2025 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

I am very passionate about creating high-quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) solutions. I have worked on a wide variety of topics related to TTS including data collection and annotation, acoustic model training and finetuning, linguistic preprocessing, prosody modeling, evaluation, and much more. Check out my Services page to see in more detail what kind of services I can deliver for you.

I chose the name phAIstos, because I am fascinated by language and the Phaistos disk is a clay disk from the middle or late Minoan era found in Phaistos on Crete in Greece. To this day, archaeologists have not been able to decipher it. I really enjoy puzzles and deciphering things and solving language and speech related problems. I also like the name because it has the letters AI in it, which is prevalent in all speech and language related technology.

In my spare time I love to travel with my family and to take beautiful photos. You will find some of them on this web site.

I look forward to working with you. If you are interested, please fill out the form on the contact page.