Michael Hansen
Voice Engineering Lead at Open Home Foundation
Urbandale, Iowa, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Hansen is a Voice Engineering Lead with a Ph.D. in Computer and Cognitive Science and 14 years of experience building offline-first voice assistants, TTS, and intent-parsing systems. He combines research rigor from the Air Force Research Laboratory and academia with hands-on open-source engineering, contributing to notable projects like Rhasspy, Mycroft’s mimic3, Coqui TTS, and the widely used scikit-image. Michael specializes in bridging symbolic and statistical AI for speech and language—implementing phonemization, intent parsers, and robust CLI tooling (voice2json) that reduce friction between people and machines. He has a proven track record improving deployability and developer experience through Docker/build fixes and dependency reductions, and he practices test-driven development across conversation and intent systems. Based in Urbandale, Iowa, he’s equally comfortable refactoring C++ audio engines as he is adding Python tests and APIs, bringing pragmatic engineering to voice tech stacks.
14 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science and Cognitive Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Indiana University BloomingtonBachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at University of Wyoming
Github Skills (58)
dependency-management10
unit-testing10
speech-to-text10
pytorch10
docker10
c-language10
parser10
test-driven-design10
event-handling10
python10
apidoc10
image-processing10
testing10
mqtt10
command-line-interface10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
rhasspy/piper
Oct 2022 - Mar 2023
A fast, local neural text to speech system
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 2 reviews, 50 commits in 4 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to removing dependencies and refactoring code within the C++ codebase. They removed a dependency on Boost, which likely improved the build process and reduced the overall size of the project. They also made modifications to the main application file, adjusting output types and argument parsing. These changes suggest a focus on optimizing the core functionality and build configuration of the text-to-speech system.
text-to-speechspeech-synthesistts
synesthesiam/rhasspy
Dec 2018 - Jun 2020
Rhasspy voice assistant for offline home automation
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 551 commits, 62 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael implemented several features for the Rhasspy voice assistant, including the ability to begin and end remote tests, transcribe speech to text using remote services, and added a remote system for intent recognition. They also made improvements to existing components, such as adding a home assistant service and improving settings in the user interface. The user also worked on general improvements, fixes, and added a new feature for setting a custom command-line argument.
home-automationvoice-assistantspeech-recognitionhome-assistanthassio
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