Arabic Linguist AI & TTS

About Unifonic

Unifonic is an AI-native customer experience platform recognized as a Great Place to Work®. With over 25 years of conversational AI research and development, Unifonic serves more than 5,000 enterprises across MENA. The company is pioneering sovereign, agentic AI through its Agentic Studio platform and values creativity, collaboration, and innovation from its employees.

Role Overview: Arabic Linguist – AI & TTS

This part-time role as an Arabic Linguist is within Unifonic's Engineering team, which is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the systems and technologies that drive Unifonic’s solutions. The team collaborates with other departments to ensure products and services meet customer needs. The Arabic Linguist will support the Text-to-Speech (TTS) team with linguistic analysis, Arabic dialect expertise, pronunciation and speech-quality evaluation, and voice-related projects, contributing to the quality and accuracy of Arabic speech technology.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct research on the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of Arabic, with a focus on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi/Gulf dialects, particularly the Najdi dialect.
• Provide linguistic guidance for the integration of Arabic linguistic structures into Sestek products.
• Serve as a linguistic point of contact for the R&D / AI team.
• Translate linguistic requirements into clear, 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 output quality in terms of pronunciation accuracy, prosody, dialect authenticity, and naturalness, with a particular focus on Saudi Arabic.
• Provide linguistic guidance and support for Arabic voice data collection and speech synthesis projects.
• Identify and onboard suitable voice talents as needed.
• Support the coordination and review of voice recording and editing processes to ensure linguistic accuracy and consistency.
• Support the onboarding and coordination of external Arabic language consultants and provide guidance on linguistic requirements.
• Review and provide linguistic feedback on data annotation activities and guidelines, ensuring appropriate quality standards for Arabic and Saudi dialect data.
• Collaborate closely with the Sestek TTS and AI Research teams, providing ongoing linguistic expertise throughout projects.

Qualifications and Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Linguistics, Arabic Language and Literature, Translation and Interpreting, or a related field.
• Native proficiency in Arabic, with a strong command of MSA and Saudi Arabic dialects.
• Native or near-native proficiency in the Najdi dialect 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).
• Good command of English, as it will be the working language with the R&D / AI team.
• Strong communication skills and comfort working with technical, non-linguist colleagues.
• Familiarity with speech technologies (TTS/ASR), voice data collection, or NLP is a plus.
• Experience working with Saudi Arabic dialects, particularly the Najdi dialect, is highly preferred.

Work Environment and Location

This is a part-time position based in Riyadh, Riyadh Province. The role requires the ability to collaborate remotely with teams located in Türkiye and Saudi Arabia.