SLT Consultancy Hub
In years 3 and 4, our students work together on the "SLT Consultancy Hub".
This is a student-led SLT consultancy-style service to help external organisations to understand how SLTs can be of value to their work and what would be needed to start using them. The goal of this activity is for our students to undertake real work for real “clients”, in order to gain valuable industrial consultancy experience.
Students work with the client to understand their activities and needs. Based on this, they produce a short report describing the speech and / or language fields applicable to the client’s use case, review the various technologies (state of the art as well as turn key solutions) that are available and make recommendations regarding one or more technologies to pursue and (where relevant) recommend third parties who can offer implementation assistance.
Students offer advice and recommendation(s) in the form of a written report. In certain circumstances, it may be appropriate for them to demonstrate a technology using some test data (possibly provided by the client). However, developing prototype or full systems is beyond the scope of this exercise.
Each client enquiry is managed by small student teams formed to bring together the necessary expertise.
This activity is modelled on a unique feature of our host department: our masters students run their own software company, Genesys, which accepts real contracts for real clients.