aah. Okay. Disclaimer, [b] this isn't my area [/b] and I'm going to miss some folks. I apologize to all of the important and interesting work that I'm missing.

Also, I'm really linking to research groups, so take these names as starting points and look at their students and other professors working with them.

First off, the Blizzard challenge is a major hub of activity. [4] Festival is an important piece of software [5]. Interspeech is an important conference [6] (take a look at the speech synthesis track and the organizers for that).

Alan Black [0] @ CMU is kinda a giant.

Keiichi Tokuda [3] @ Nagoya also a giant.

Simon King [1] @ Edinburgh, just had a paper linked to on HN a few days ago and does important work.

Mark Gales [2] @ Cambridge does work here, too.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/ [1] http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/ssi/people/simonk.html [2] http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mjfg/ [3] http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/ [4] http://festvox.org/blizzard/ [5] http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ [6] http://interspeech2015.org/wp-content/uploads/direct/INTERSP...