Ghent University
Adam RobertsDirector of Research · Google DeepMindResearcher↗
Researcher
Aäron van den Oord
Google DeepMindResearch Scientist
Van den Oord co-created WaveNet, which made computer-generated speech more natural and powered Google Assistant voices.[1] His PixelCNN work advanced image generation, while VQ-VAE taught models to represent images and sound using a learned set of reusable codes.
Career & education
Current role
Research Scientist
Education
Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations76,406As of Oct 28, '26
Selected contributions
WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio
With Sander Dieleman, Heiga Zen, Karén Simonyan, Oriol Vinyals, Alex Graves, Nal Kalchbrenner, Andrew Senior and others ·Introduces a neural network that generates sound directly, one audio sample at a time. It produced more natural-sounding synthetic speech than leading systems in listener tests and could also generate musical fragments.
References
- WaveNet launches in the Google Assistantdeepmind.google
WaveNet contribution and deployment in Google Assistant voices.
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Reviewed October 28, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.
