Icelandic delegation.png
Top row, center: H. E. Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, president of Iceland. Top row, from left of president: Robin Dautricourt, principal product manager, Amazon Polly; Jack FitzGerald, senior applied scientist, Amazon Alexa AI; Nikko Ström, distinguished scientist and VP, Amazon Alexa AI; Michele Butti, director, Amazon Alexa International. Top row, from right of president: Halldór Benjamín Þorbergsson, CEO of the Confederation of Icelandic Enterprise; Björgvin Ingi Ólafsson, member of the Board of Almannarómur, the Icelandic Center for Language Technology; Jón Guðnason, associate professor of signal processing and language technology, Reykjavík University. Middle row, from left of president: Nikulás Hannigan, Iceland’s trade commissioner to North America and consul general in New York; Stefanía G. Halldórsdóttir, chairman of the Board of Almannarómur. Middle row from right of president: Susan Pointer, VP, public policy, Amazon; Jóhanna Vigdís Guðmundsdottir, CEO of Almannarómur; Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson, founder and CEO of Miðeind; Kristrún Heiða Hauksdóttir, specialist at the Ministry for Cultural and Business Affairs. Bottom row: Lilja Dögg Alfreðsdóttir, minister of cultural and business affairs; Nikhil Sharma, senior manager of product management, Amazon Text-to-Speech.

Amazon scientists welcome Iceland’s presidential delegation

President’s visit part of a mission to preserve the Icelandic language in the digital age.

Recently at our Seattle headquarters, Amazon had the pleasure of hosting Iceland’s President, H. E. Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, along with a delegation spanning Icelandic government officials, business leaders, and academics. It was truly an honor to meet with them.

Related content
Arabic posed unique challenges for speech recognition, language understanding, and speech synthesis.

The president’s visit to the region was part of a broader mission to preserve the Icelandic language in the digital age through its integration into all forms of technology. In this post, we’d like to highlight some of the exciting and innovative work Iceland has spearheaded in an effort to accelerate the digital integration of Icelandic. We have found these to be strong, collaborative tools, and we hope others do, too.

Since 2019, Iceland’s government has been funding a five-year language technology program for Icelandic, which has led to an impressive set of artifacts relevant to text-to-speech, speech recognition, and natural-language-processing. These include parallel datasets, pronunciation lexicons, text normalization mappings, speech data, treebanks, tokenizers, named-entity recognizers, and modeling recipes. These tools have important applications in all languages, particularly those with relatively small amounts of data for training machine learning models.

The program’s strategy is multifaceted, targeting everything from fundamental research to customer-facing products. Its five core research areas are language resources, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and spelling and grammar checking.

Related content
In experiments, multilingual models outperform monolingual models.

A list of selected resources appears below. We hope that you will use these resources in your own work, and we encourage you to keep an eye on the program’s progress.

Additionally, we’d like to highlight some work that Amazon has been doing for language expansion and low-data natural-language processing.

We recently launched the MASSIVE dataset, competition, and workshop, which will help advance the state of the art for multilingual natural-language understanding, for Icelandic and 50 other languages.

Amazon Translate has expanded into 75 languages, and Amazon Polly supports 33 languages, both including Icelandic. Language expansion and support is a consistent effort across many Amazon services and products.

Related content
Parallel speech recognizers, language ID, and translation models geared to conversational speech are among the modifications that make Live Translation possible.

We’ve also been busy in core scientific research, including research in cross-lingual transfer learning, zero-shot transfer learning, multilingual training data generation, adversarial advertisement detection, text normalization for new languages in text-to-speech systems, and continuous improvement with machine translation. These are just a few examples. If you’d like to join us in tackling similar challenges, please visit our careers page.

The prevailing sentiment during our meeting with the Icelandic presidential delegation was one of optimism — optimism that developers everywhere can leverage recent and upcoming advances in artificial intelligence to accelerate the integration of Icelandic and other languages into all types of technology.

Keep building.

Resources

Here are some resources provided to us by the Icelandic delegation that you may find useful:

  • An overview of the program and past work.
  • Parallel text-speech database for TTS (Talrómur)The first part of the database (Talrómur 1) consists of 220 hours of studio-quality recordings from four female and four male voices. Each voice donor recorded between 10 and 30 hours of data, which should be sufficient to build a voice that sounds like that donor. The data is available under a Creative Commons 4.0 BY license.
  • Talrómur 280 hours of studio-quality recordings from 20 female and 20 male voices. Each voice donor recorded approximately two hours of data. While two hours might not be enough to create a voice from scratch based on a specific voice donor, it should be possible to join the voices in this dataset (and, indeed, in Talrómur 1) to create a voice that is a unique mix of the voices in the dataset. The data is available under a Creative Commons 4.0 BY license.
  • Icelandic pronunciation dictionary: A manually verified pronunciation lexicon containing almost 50,000 unique word forms transcribed in four pronunciation variants, often including a clear and a less formal transcription (reading pronunciation vs. casual-speech pronunciation). The repository contains transcription rules and guidelines followed in the project. The dictionary is available under a Creative Commons 4.0. BY license.
  • Text normalization corpusA corpus of 40,000 sentences, manually normalized for TTS (an example of a normalization task in TTS is converting, e.g., “$30” to “thirty dollars”).
  • Text preprocessing for TTSA text-preprocessing pipeline connecting standalone modules for text cleaning, text normalization, phrasing, and grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion. The front-end pipeline and all submodules are available under an Apache 2.0 license.
  • Recipes for Icelandic TTSOpen-source TTS recipes for Icelandic have been made available as part of the Language Technology Programme for Icelandic (LTPI). A traditional unit selection recipe implemented in Festival is available here under an Apache 2.0 license.
  • Neural-TTS recipe: Implemented in FastSpeech. Available under Apache 2.0 license.
  • Talrómur 1 baseline models, train/test splits, and alignments
  • Parallel text-speech database for ASR (Samrómur): The Samrómur crowd-sourcing platform is derived from the Mozilla Common Voice project. It is based on read prompts from volunteers and totals over 2,300 hours of data. The crowdsourcing statistics can be seen here. A concurrent verification effort has led to publications (under Creative Commons 4.0 BY licenses) that can, for example, be found here. A similar dataset of 152 hours of adult voices was collected around 2011 and is available here.
  • Parliamentary speech data542 hours of clean and verified speeches from the Icelandic parliament.

Other speech databases

Resources for ASR language modeling

Other tools and recipes for ASR

Research areas

Related content

IL, Tel Aviv
Come join the AWS Agentic AI science team in building the next generation models for intelligent automation. AWS, the world-leading provider of cloud services, has fostered the creation and growth of countless new businesses, and is a positive force for good. Our customers bring problems that will give Applied Scientists like you endless opportunities to see your research have a positive and immediate impact in the world. You will have the opportunity to partner with technology and business teams to solve real-world problems, have access to virtually endless data and computational resources, and to world-class engineers and developers that can help bring your ideas into the world. As part of the team, we expect that you will develop innovative solutions to hard problems, and publish your findings at peer reviewed conferences and workshops. We are looking for world class researchers with experience in one or more of the following areas - autonomous agents, API orchestration, Planning, large multimodal models (especially vision-language models), reinforcement learning (RL) and sequential decision making.
IL, Tel Aviv
Are you a Masters or PhD student interested in a 2026 Internship in Data Science? If so, we want to hear from you! We are looking for a customer obsessed Data Scientist Intern who can innovate in a business environment and is comfortable owning data to drive step-change innovation in the EMEA region or worldwide. If this describes you, come and join our Data Science teams at Amazon for an exciting internship opportunity. If you are insatiably curious and always want to learn more, then you’ve come to the right place. You can find more information about the Amazon Science community as well as our interview process via the links below; https://www.amazon.science/ https://amazon.jobs/content/en/career-programs/university/science Key job responsibilities As a Data Science Intern, you will have the following key job responsibilities: • Work closely with scientists and engineers to develop new algorithms to implement scientific solutions for Amazon problems • Design, run, and analyze A/B tests • Work on an interdisciplinary team on customer-obsessed research • Experience Amazon's customer-focused culture • Create and deliver projects that can be quickly applied starting locally and scaled to EMEA/worldwide • Create and share data with audiences of varying levels technical papers and presentations • Define metrics and design algorithms to estimate customer satisfaction and engagement A day in the life At Amazon, you will grow into the high impact person you know you’re ready to be. Every day will be filled with developing new skills and achieving personal growth. How often can you say that your work changes the world? At Amazon, you’ll say it often. Join us and define tomorrow. Some more benefits of an Amazon Science internship include; • All of our internships offer a competitive stipend/salary • Interns are paired with an experienced manager and mentor(s) • Interns receive invitations to different events such as intern program initiatives or site events • Interns can build their professional and personal network with other Amazon Scientists • Interns can potentially publish work at top tier conferences each year About the team Applicants will be reviewed on a rolling basis and are assigned to teams aligned with their research interests and experience prior to interviews. Start dates are available throughout the year and durations can vary in length from 3-6 months for full time internships or 6-12 months for part time internships. Please note these are not remote internships.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Alexa+ is the world’s best Generative AI powered personal assistant / agent for consumers. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join our newly expanding team in India focused on Alexa Conversational Ads and Personalization. In this role, you will build machine learning models that seamlessly and naturally integrate relevant advertising into the Alexa experience while deeply personalizing user interactions. You will work closely with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to take models from conception to production. Key job responsibilities Design, develop, and evaluate innovative deep learning and GenAI models for natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, and personalization. Conduct hands-on data analysis and build scalable ML pipelines. Design and run A/B experiments to measure the impact of new models on customer experience and ad performance. Collaborate with software development engineers to deploy models into high-scale, real-time production environments. About the team We are building a new science team in Bangalore to solve some of the most impactful problems in computational advertising. This isn't about tweaking existing models as we are rethinking how ads are ranked, priced, and personalized across voice-first and screen-first surfaces. These are problems that don't have textbook solutions. Key points to note about the team: 🧪 Greenfield team - you are not joining a mature org with rigid processes. You will shape the science roadmap, pick the problems, and define the culture from day one. 📈 Direct business impact — your models directly drive revenue. No yearly cycles to see if your work matters. 🌏 Global scope, local autonomy — collaborate with scientists and engineers across Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Bangalore, but own your problem space end-to-end. 🎓 Ship AND Publish: We encourage top-tier publications (NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, ICML, WWW) while ensuring your research hits production.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Alexa+ is the world’s best Generative AI powered personal assistant / agent for consumers. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join our newly expanding team in India focused on Alexa Conversational Ads and Personalization. In this role, you will build machine learning models that seamlessly and naturally integrate relevant advertising into the Alexa experience while deeply personalizing user interactions. You will work closely with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to take models from conception to production. Key job responsibilities Design, develop, and evaluate innovative deep learning and GenAI models for natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, and personalization. Conduct hands-on data analysis and build scalable ML pipelines. Design and run A/B experiments to measure the impact of new models on customer experience and ad performance. Collaborate with software development engineers to deploy models into high-scale, real-time production environments. About the team We are building a new science team in Bangalore to solve some of the most impactful problems in computational advertising. This isn't about tweaking existing models as we are rethinking how ads are ranked, priced, and personalized across voice-first and screen-first surfaces. These are problems that don't have textbook solutions. Key points to note about the team: 🧪 Greenfield team - you are not joining a mature org with rigid processes. You will shape the science roadmap, pick the problems, and define the culture from day one. 📈 Direct business impact — your models directly drive revenue. No yearly cycles to see if your work matters. 🌏 Global scope, local autonomy — collaborate with scientists and engineers across Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Bangalore, but own your problem space end-to-end. 🎓 Ship AND Publish: We encourage top-tier publications (NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, ICML, WWW) while ensuring your research hits production.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Alexa+ is the world’s best Generative AI powered personal assistant / agent for consumers. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join our newly expanding team in India focused on Alexa Conversational Ads and Personalization. In this role, you will build machine learning models that seamlessly and naturally integrate relevant advertising into the Alexa experience while deeply personalizing user interactions. You will work closely with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to take models from conception to production. Key job responsibilities Design, develop, and evaluate innovative deep learning and GenAI models for natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, and personalization. Conduct hands-on data analysis and build scalable ML pipelines. Design and run A/B experiments to measure the impact of new models on customer experience and ad performance. Collaborate with software development engineers to deploy models into high-scale, real-time production environments. About the team We are building a new science team in Bangalore to solve some of the most impactful problems in computational advertising. This isn't about tweaking existing models as we are rethinking how ads are ranked, priced, and personalized across voice-first and screen-first surfaces. These are problems that don't have textbook solutions. Key points to note about the team: 🧪 Greenfield team - you are not joining a mature org with rigid processes. You will shape the science roadmap, pick the problems, and define the culture from day one. 📈 Direct business impact — your models directly drive revenue. No yearly cycles to see if your work matters. 🌏 Global scope, local autonomy — collaborate with scientists and engineers across Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Bangalore, but own your problem space end-to-end. 🎓 Ship AND Publish: We encourage top-tier publications (NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, ICML, WWW) while ensuring your research hits production.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Alexa+ is the world’s best Generative AI powered personal assistant / agent for consumers. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join our newly expanding team in India focused on Alexa Conversational Ads and Personalization. In this role, you will build machine learning models that seamlessly and naturally integrate relevant advertising into the Alexa experience while deeply personalizing user interactions. You will work closely with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to take models from conception to production. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and evaluate innovative machine learning and deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, and personalization. - Conduct hands-on data analysis and build scalable ML pipelines. - Design and run A/B experiments to measure the impact of new models on customer experience and ad performance. - Collaborate with software development engineers to deploy models into high-scale, real-time production environments.
US, CA, San Francisco
Join Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team as a Member of Technical Staff, this Technical Program Manager will become the driving force behind breakthrough robotics innovation. You'll orchestrate complex, cross-functional programs that bridge AI research, software, hardware, and production deployment—managing the technical workstreams that enable robots to see, reason, and act in Amazon's warehouse environments. Your program leadership will directly accelerate our mission to build the next generation of embodied intelligence. Key job responsibilities · Establish and drive program management mechanisms and cadence for complex robotics and AI development initiatives spanning research, software engineering, hardware, and operations · Manage end-to-end program execution across the full robotics stack—including AI models, software engineering, and hardware deployment · Drive decision-making velocity by facilitating tradeoff discussions when there are conflicting priorities; determine whether decisions are one-way or two-way doors · Own program-level risk management, proactively identifying technical, schedule, and resource risks; escalate where necessary and drive mitigation strategies · Manage dependencies and scope changes across internal teams and partner organizations, ensuring alignment on commitments, timelines, and technical requirements · Create transparency through clear RACI frameworks, program dashboards, and communication mechanisms that keep stakeholders aligned on status, risks, and decisions · Exercise strong technical judgment to influence program-level decisions on deployment methodology, scalability requirements, and technical feasibility—acting as the voice back to research and engineering teams · Build sustainable program management processes that scale as our organization grows, adapting agile frameworks to the unique challenges of AI robotics A day in the life Your focus centers on driving velocity and alignment across our robotics programs. You might start your morning facilitating tradeoff decisions between AI researchers and software engineers on a critical prototype milestone, then transition to managing dependencies across hardware and operations teams to keep timelines on track. In the afternoon, you could be conducting risk assessments on supply chain constraints that impact our development roadmap, updating program dashboards to provide leadership visibility, or working with partner teams to align on deployment strategies. You'll establish the mechanisms and cadence that keep our fast-moving organization synchronized—from sprint planning rituals to cross-functional design reviews. Throughout the day, you balance hands-on program execution with strategic escalation, ensuring technical decisions align with our long-term vision while removing obstacles that slow teams down. You're the connective tissue that enables researchers, engineers, and operations specialists to move fast together. About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through frontier foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
US, CA, San Francisco
We are seeking a hands-on Electrical Engineer to lead the design and integration of electrical systems or subsystems for high-degree-of-freedom robotic platforms. This role involves architecting the robot’s power distribution, sensor wiring, and embedded electrical infrastructure. You will be responsible for designing across the full electrical system for advanced robotics platforms including power distribution, sensing, compute, motor controllers, communication infrastructure, battery system and power electronics in close collaboration with mechanical, controls and software engineers. You’ll play a key role in ensuring high-performance, reliable operation of complex electromechanical systems under real-world conditions. Key job responsibilities * Electrical system architect / owner for power electronics, actuation, PCBAs, battery, ware harness specs and high speed electrical/communications protocols * Design, develop and integrate power distribution, embedded electronics, motor controllers and safety-critical circuits for complex robotic systems * Own board layout of PCBAs including SoCs, microcontrollers, sensors, power devices, etc. using Cadence OrCAD/Allegro or equivalent tools. Oversee bring-up and validation * Determine appropriate high speed electrical and communication protocols (e.g., CAN, EtherCAT, USB, etc) for reliable and efficient system operation * Specify and design custom power electronics and power distribution boards to meet performance, thermal, and safety requirements * Design and route all cabling and wire harnesses across the robotic platform, considering EMI, signal integrity, serviceability, and integration with mechanical structures * Architect and integrate the robot’s battery system, including protection circuitry, battery management, charging systems, and thermal considerations * Define and implement wiring and electrical interfaces for sensors (e.g., lidar, stereo cameras, IMUs, tactile) and compute modules * Ownership over prototyping and bringing up electrical designs and creation of test & validation rigs About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through innovative foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
US, NY, New York
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to develop and optimize Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) and sensor fusion systems for our intelligent robots. In this role, you will design, implement, and deploy state estimation and tracking algorithms that enable robots to understand their position and motion in real time, even in challenging and dynamic environments. You will own the full pipeline from algorithm development through embedded deployment, ensuring that perception systems run efficiently on resource-constrained robotic hardware. You will also leverage modern machine learning approaches to push the boundaries of classical perception methods, combining learned representations with geometric techniques to achieve robust, real-time performance. This is a deeply hands-on role. You will work directly with sensors, hardware, and real-world data, while prototyping, testing, and iterating in physical environments. The ideal candidate has strong foundations in VIO and sensor fusion, practical experience optimizing algorithms for embedded platforms, and familiarity with how modern deep learning is transforming perception. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement Visual Inertial Odometry algorithms for robust real-time state estimation on robotic platforms like Sprout - Develop multi-sensor fusion pipelines integrating cameras, IMUs, and other sensing modalities for accurate pose tracking - Optimize perception and tracking algorithms for deployment on embedded hardware (e.g., ARM, GPU-accelerated edge devices) under strict latency and power constraints - Apply modern ML-based perception techniques (learned features, depth estimation, neural odometry) to complement and improve classical geometric approaches - Build and maintain calibration, evaluation, and benchmarking infrastructure for perception systems - Collaborate with hardware, controls, and navigation teams to integrate perception outputs into the robot’s autonomy stack - Lead technical projects from research prototyping through production deployment
US, WA, Bellevue
The candidate in this role will own delivery of science products and solutions to help Amazon Devices Sales and Marketing org. make better decisions: product recommendations to customers, segmentation, financial incrementality of marketing initiatives, A/B testing etc. Key job responsibilities The Amazon Devices organization designs, produces and markets Echo Speakers, Kindle e-readers, Fire Tablets, Fire TV Streaming Media Players, Ring and Blink Smart Home & Security products. We are constantly looking to innovate on behalf of customers with new devices in existing or new categories or improving customer experience on existing platforms. The Devices Data Services (DDS) team provides Data Science, Analytics and Engineering support to the broader organization to enable Sales and Marketing activities across all these product lines. We are looking for an innovative, hands-on and customer-obsessed Data Scientist who can be a strategic partner to the product managers and engineers on the team. Our projects span multiple organizations and require coordination of experimentation, economic and causal analysis, and building predictive machine learning models. A successful candidate will be a problem solver who enjoys diving into data, is excited by difficult modeling challenges, is motivated to build something that will eventually become a production software system, and possesses strong communication skills to effectively interface between technical and business teams. In this role, you will be a technical expert with massive impact. You will take the lead on developing advanced ML systems that are key to reaching our customers with the right recommendations at the right time. Your work will directly impact the success of Amazon's growing Devices business. You will work across diverse science/engineering/business teams. You will work on critical data science problems, building high quality, reliable, accurate, and consistent code sets that are aligned with our business needs. Key Performance Areas - Implement statistical or machine learning methods to solve specific business problems. - Improve upon existing methodologies by developing new data sources, testing model enhancements, and fine-tuning model parameters. - Directly contribute to development of modern automated recommendation systems - Build customer-facing reporting tools to provide insights and metrics to track model performance and explain variance - Collaborate with researchers, software developers, and business leaders to define product requirements, provide analytical support, and communicate feedback A day in the life You will work with other scientists, engineers, product managers, and marketers to develop new products that benefit our customers and help us reach our business goals. You will own solutions from end to end: conceptualization, prioritization, development, delivery, and productionalization. About the team We are a full stack science team that empowers product, marketing, and other business leaders to better understand customers who use Amazon devices, make decisions on product development or optimization, and measure the effectiveness of their efforts against our customer’s expectation. Our focus area is to build analytical frameworks that help the organization either access data, better understand the decisions customers are making and why, or assess customer satisfaction.