Georgia Maniati

Georgia Maniati is a computational linguist and language engineer. She specializes in text-to-speech technology, a sub-field of artificial intelligence that converts written text into spoken words. This technology gives machines a voice, making human-computer interaction more natural and providing easier access to the world of information.

She received an Onassis Foundation Scholarship to complete her interdisciplinary MSc in Speech and Language Processing, which combined linguistics, artificial intelligence, and computer science, at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. During her undergraduate studies in linguistics in Athens, she received scholarships from the State Scholarships Foundation and Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies, and she also studied at the University of Strasbourg in France.

She has worked as a language research and development engineer abroad. She returned to Greece to become the first woman and youngest member of the team at Innoetics, the spin-off of the Institute of Speech Processing at the Athena Research Center that was acquired by Samsung Electronics, to establish an Athens-based research team. She is now a Speech and Language Research Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence group at Samsung Electronics, developing synthetic voices for the company's wide range of devices and languages worldwide, as well as for its voice assistant, Bixby. She has worked on research projects for the Athena Research Center's Department of Language Resources, including the creation of the first Greek computational conceptual lexicon, and has co-authored academic papers on a variety of language technology topics.

She is deeply committed to artificial intelligence literacy and equity in language technologies, including addressing gender bias and underrepresentation of minority groups in language data. She is actively involved in science communication and popularizing AI concepts to children, while she has recently given speeches to wide audiences at the Athens Science Festival and TEDx Mavili Square.