Arabic Linguist AI & TTS

About Unifonic and the Role

Unifonic, recognized as a Great Place to Work®, is an AI-native customer experience platform serving over 5,000 enterprises across MENA. The company specializes in conversational AI and is developing sovereign, agentic AI through its Agentic Studio platform. This part-time role for an Arabic Linguist is based in Riyadh, Riyadh Province, and involves supporting the Text-to-Speech (TTS) team with linguistic analysis and Arabic dialect expertise.

Role Overview

As an Arabic Linguist, you will contribute linguistic expertise to real production projects within the AI and TTS team. Your work will focus on improving the quality, accuracy, and naturalness of Arabic speech technology. The role requires strong expertise in Saudi Arabic dialects, with a preference for native or near-native proficiency in the Najdi dialect.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct research on the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of Arabic, focusing on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi/Gulf dialects, particularly Najdi, and provide linguistic guidance for their integration into Sestek products.
• Serve as a linguistic point of contact for the R&D / AI team, translating linguistic requirements into 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 for pronunciation accuracy, prosody, dialect authenticity, and naturalness, with a focus on Saudi Arabic.
• Provide linguistic guidance and support for Arabic voice data collection and speech synthesis projects, including identifying and onboarding suitable voice talents.
• Support the coordination and review of voice recording and editing processes to ensure linguistic accuracy and consistency.
• Assist in onboarding and coordinating external Arabic language consultants, providing guidance on linguistic requirements.
• Review and provide linguistic feedback on data annotation activities and guidelines, ensuring quality standards for Arabic and Saudi dialect data.
• Collaborate with the Sestek TTS and AI Research teams, offering 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.
• Ability to work on a part-time basis and collaborate remotely with teams based in Türkiye and Saudi Arabia.

Work Environment

This is a part-time position that involves remote collaboration with teams located in Türkiye and Saudi Arabia. The role is based in Riyadh, within the Riyadh Province.