Xiaomi's Chief Speech Scientist Daniel Povey Elected 2026 ISCA Fellow

Xiaomi's chief speech scientist Daniel Povey has been elected as a 2026 ISCA Fellow, the highest academic honor from the International Speech Communication Association, with only about 100 recipients worldwide. He is one of eight scholars elected in 2026, recognized for his work in acoustic modeling, sequence training methods, and the open-source Kaldi toolkit. He was previously elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2023.

Povey joined Xiaomi in 2019 and leads the next-generation Kaldi project, including four sub-projects: k2, Lhotse, Icefall, and Sherpa. His team developed Zipformer, the first speech encoder to surpass Google's Conformer, with the 2026 upgrade Zapformer improving recognition accuracy by 10-15%. OmniVoice, a multilingual TTS model supporting over 600 languages, can clone voices with just 3-10 seconds of reference audio, and has been downloaded over 5 million times on Huggingface in three months.