Black did his undergraduate studies at Coventry University, graduating in 1984. He earned a master's degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1993. After working at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kansai Science City, Japan and at the University of Edinburgh, he took a research faculty position at Carnegie Mellon in 1999. In 2008 he became a regular faculty member with tenure at CMU.[2]
Black wrote the Festival Speech Synthesis System at Edinburgh, and continues to develop it at Carnegie Mellon. He has also worked on machine translation of speech at CMU,[3] and is the co-founder and was chief scientist at Cepstral, a Pittsburgh-based speech translation technology company.[4][5]