Audio Research

About Lightberry Lightberry builds the software layer for expressive, interactive robots. We combine voice AI, perception, and behavior systems so robots can understand people and respond naturally. We are a small, hands-on team based in San Francisco, working across software, hardware, design, and research to turn new capabilities into robots people can interact with today. We care about thoughtful craft, fast iteration, and shipping real systems into the world. Robots with Souls Yep, you read that right. Robots are here, but they ship with no software. They’re all mute, deaf, and blind out of the box. The only way to get the robot to do anything is to write code. This is insane. We want robots to behave like in the movies: proactive, caring, aware. The role Speech is our robots’ first language. Understanding it in a noisy room, speaking with warmth and timing, knowing the difference between a pause and an ending — that’s your research. Your models won’t live in a demo. They’ll live in a robot’s head, streaming in real time. What you’ll do Research speech and audio models: understanding, synthesis, and everything between. Make them robust to the real world: crowds, echo, distance, interruptions. Squeeze them into real time on on-robot compute. Work with our audio engineers so hardware and models improve each other. What’s needed We don’t care about degrees or citation counts. Show us what you’ve built and what you’ve figured out. We do need: Speech. You’ve done serious work in speech or audio ML: recognition, synthesis, enhancement, or representation learning. Engineering. Your research runs outside a notebook: you write real code and ship it. Real time. Streaming, low-latency inference is home turf, not an afterthought. Fun. You have a folder of audio experiments that never needed to exist. Bonus points Hearables. You’ve worked on voice products, hearables, or conversational systems. Signal. Classic DSP intuition to go with the models. 你会说中文吗? How to apply Tell us about something you’ve worked on before that you’re proud of Send something we can listen to: a model, a demo, a paper with samples Show, don’t tell Keep it short One last thing… DO NOT apply if… You can’t stand chaos You’d work remotely every day if you could You’re not a people-person You’re pessimistic about tech, AI, and the future PLEASE apply if… You want to do your life’s work You care about developing and expressing your craft You love intense, fast-paced environments You like getting your hands dirty, no work is beneath you Life’s short, why work on B2B AI SAAS infra slop when you could work on speaking robots?