Gunnar Fant

He specialized in the acoustics of the human voice, measuring formant values, and continued to work in this area at Ericsson and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fant's work led to the birth of a new era of speech synthesis with the introduction of powerful and configurable formant synthesizers.

In the 1960s, Gunnar Fant's Orator Verbis Electris (OVE) competed with Walter Lawrence's Parametric Artificial Talker (PAT)[2] in creating lifelike speech synthesis.

In later years, Gunnar Fant remained active in the area of speech synthesis, focusing mainly on research on prosody.

In 1989, he was the inaugural recipient Scientific Achievement Medal of the International Speech Communication Association.