Research Scientist Intern, Audio Quality with AI (PhD)

The Meta Reality Labs Research Team brings together a world-class team of researchers, developers, and engineers to create the future of virtual and augmented reality, which together will become as universal and essential as smartphones and personal computers are today. And just as personal computers have done over the past 45 years, AR, VR and MR will ultimately change everything about how we work, play, and connect. We are developing all the technologies needed to enable breakthrough AR glasses and VR headsets, including optics and displays, computer vision, audio, graphics, brain-computer interfaces, haptic interaction, eye/hand/face/body tracking, perception science, and true telepresence. Some of those will advance much faster than others, but they all need to happen to enable AR, VR and MR that are so compelling that they become an integral part of our lives. In particular, the Meta Reality Labs Research audio team is focused on two goals; creating virtual sounds that are perceptually indistinguishable from reality, and redefining human hearing. See more about our work here: Inside Facebook Reality Labs Research: The future of audio and Filter Out the Noise With Conversation Focus. These two initiatives will allow us to connect people by allowing them to feel together despite being physically apart, and allow them to converse in even the most difficult listening environments. Meta Reality Labs Research is looking for an intern who is passionate about speech perception and audio quality to investigate why processed speech sometimes sounds degraded or robotic. The project focuses on identifying systematic phonemic errors as causal factors in perceived quality degradation, and linking these errors to human quality and intelligibility judgments. A core method is to explore the capabilities of audio vs video LLMs. This is fundamentally a speech-perception research role; multimodal/LLM methods are a supporting tool rather than the central focus. Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year.