He previously worked in the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh, and before that at ATR in Japan. He is one of the principal authors of the free software Festival Speech Synthesis System, the FestVox voice building tools and CMU Flite, a small footprint speech synthesis engine. He received his PhD in Computational Linguistics from Edinburgh University in 1993, his MSc in Knowledge Based Systems also from Edinburgh in 1986, and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Coventry University in 1984.