Alex Waibel, a professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, has been elected a fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

The ISCA recognized Waibel for his pioneering contributions in multilingual and multimodal spoken language processing and translation. Waibel, also faculty at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has worked on speech and machine translation for decades, developing systems that now can translate speech in real time.

Waibel demonstrated the first speech translation systems in the 1990s and 2000s. By 2020, he had developed a system that outperformed humans in recognizing conversational speech on a public benchmark. Waibel has founded and co-founded nearly a dozen companies, including Jibbigo, which was acquired by Facebook.

He also founded KITES, a company that uses machine translation technology and predictive AI to translate speech or provide subtitles simultaneously in real time. Translated speech will appear during speech before a speaker completes a sentence, and the software will autocorrect on its own if needed. Zoom recently acquired KITES, and Waibel advises the company's scientific research and development as a Zoom Research Fellow.

The ISCA fellows program recognizes outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the science and technology of speech communication. Waibel will be honored during the opening ceremony of INTERSPEECH 2022 this September in South Korea.