Part-Time Arabic Linguist – AI & TTS

About this task

Part-time, onsite Arabic Linguist role in Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia, supporting a Text-to-Speech (TTS) team through linguistic analysis, dialect expertise, pronunciation and speech-quality evaluation, and voice-related projects.

Responsibilities:
- Research Arabic phonology, morphology, and syntax, focusing on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi/Gulf dialects, particularly Najdi, and provide guidance for integration into speech technology products.
- Act as a linguistic point of contact for the R&D and AI teams, translating linguistic requirements into actionable input for engineers.
- Analyze and review pronunciation data, including grapheme-to-phoneme mappings, diacritization/tashkeel, and lexicons for Arabic TTS and speech recognition systems.
- Evaluate TTS pronunciation accuracy, prosody, dialect authenticity, and naturalness, particularly for Saudi Arabic.
- Support Arabic voice-data collection and speech-synthesis projects, including identifying and onboarding suitable voice talent when needed.
- Help coordinate and review voice recording and editing processes for linguistic accuracy and consistency.
- Support onboarding and coordination of external Arabic language consultants.
- Review data-annotation activities and guidelines and provide linguistic feedback for Arabic and Saudi dialect data.
- Collaborate with TTS and AI research teams and provide ongoing linguistic expertise throughout the project.

Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Linguistics, Arabic Language and Literature, Translation and Interpreting, or a related field.
- Native Arabic proficiency, with strong command of MSA and Saudi Arabic dialects.
- Native or near-native Najdi proficiency is strongly preferred.
- Familiarity with Arabic dialects beyond Saudi Arabic is preferred.
- Strong knowledge of Arabic phonology and morphology, and familiarity with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).