Darrin Miller

12/13/2022
Darrin Miller

Darrin had always felt connected to languages; he had taken Spanish and German, done well, and enjoyed it. In 2014 he took Intro to Linguistics with a visiting professor and loved it so much that he changed his major to Linguistics. After graduating with his MA, he worked at Uhaul while also contracting his annotation skills out to companies like Appen, Lionbridge, TELUS International, and DefinedCrowd, an AI marketplace, eventually making the switch to full-time contracting. Being a freelancer afforded him a variety of experience in annotation, such as tagging linguistic data for machine learning and converting machine written language into human language through data cleaning to be reprocessed by the machine for understanding the data.  Recently, he was hired by Amazon to work remotely. He will be part of the Alexa Data Services department working with engineers to transcribe spoken data of nonstandard varieties of US English using the phonetic alphabet and his knowledge of phonology for Alexa to learn. Due to his work, Alexa will be better equipped to understand when spoken to by people with nonstandard dialects. Darrin credits Dr. Cukor-Avila, Dr. Chelliah, Katie Crowder, Dr. Kapetangianni, and Dr. Munshi for the knowledge he gained from their classes and the research that he was able to do with Dr. Cukor-Avila.