Multimodal Speech Engineer, AI Companion

About 1X
We’re an AI and robotics company based in Palo Alto, California, on a mission to build a truly abundant society through general‑purpose robots capable of performing any kind of work autonomously.
We believe that to truly understand the world and grow in intelligence, humanoid robots must live and learn alongside us. That’s why we’re focused on developing friendly home robots designed to integrate seamlessly into everyday life.
We’re looking for curious, driven, and passionate people who want to help shape the future of robotics and AI. If this mission excites you, we’d be thrilled to hear from you and explore how you might contribute to our journey.

Role Overview

The AI Companion team creates the speech interface for NEO, as well as the physical awareness behaviors that evokes trust, warmth, and competence when NEO interacts with people. 

As a Multimodal Speech Engineer on the AI Companion Team, you will lead the effort to create a conversational speech model, from design to data collection to deployment. You will develop real-time architectures that enable NEO to not only converse with users, but also incorporate other modalities like vision, spatial audio, and body language.

You will work closely with the design team to reflect NEO’s personality and 1X’s brand values in the way NEO speaks and responds to users, and the autonomy team to ensure that NEO’s speech models are aware of its own physical capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement data pipelines for large scale speech interactions from NEO data and external datasets

• Train speech2speech models to be aware of NEO’s embodiment

• Design appropriate responses for a variety of user queries

• Synchronize speech with body language

• Customize NEO with different personalities