Arabic Linguist AI & TTS

About Unifonic

Unifonic is an AI-native customer experience platform designed for emerging markets. With over 25 years of conversational AI research and development, the company serves more than 5,000 enterprises across MENA. Unifonic is recognized as a Great Place to Work® and focuses on pioneering sovereign, agentic AI through its Agentic Studio platform.

The Engineering Team

The Engineering team at Unifonic is responsible for the design, development, and maintenance of the systems and technologies that power Unifonic’s solutions. This team collaborates with other departments to ensure products and services meet customer needs, focusing on communication and engagement solutions.

About the Arabic Linguist Role

Unifonic is seeking an Arabic Linguist to support its Text-to-Speech (TTS) team. This part-time role, based in Riyadh, Riyadh Province, involves providing linguistic analysis, Arabic dialect expertise, pronunciation and speech-quality evaluation, and support for voice-related projects. The position contributes linguistic expertise to production projects and aims to enhance the quality, accuracy, and naturalness 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 structures 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 based on pronunciation accuracy, prosody, dialect authenticity, and naturalness, with a specific focus on Saudi Arabic.
• Offer linguistic guidance and support for Arabic voice data collection and speech synthesis projects, including identifying and onboarding suitable voice talents when necessary.
• Support the coordination and review of voice recording and editing processes to ensure linguistic accuracy and consistency.
• Assist in 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 with the Sestek TTS and AI Research teams, providing ongoing linguistic expertise throughout projects.

Required Qualifications

• Strong expertise in Saudi Arabic dialects, with native or near-native proficiency in the Najdi dialect highly preferred.
• Ability to work on a part-time basis.
• Capability to collaborate remotely with teams located in Türkiye and Saudi Arabia.