Laura Rosenbaum

Conversation Design Lead
General Motors

Laura Rosenbaun is currently the Conversation Design Lead at General Motors, leading a team of Conversation Designers covering GM’s current and upcoming conversational experiences. She has extensive research and design experience, for both in and out of vehicle interactions that are multimodal, voice-forward, and voice-only. Laura holds a PhD on Linguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.

Jeff Blankenburg

Principal Technical Evangelist
Amazon

Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, India, Tokyo, Sydney, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference.

Joel Crabb

Vice President, Architecture and Chief Architect
The Target Corporation

Joel Crabb serves as Vice President, Architecture, and Chief Architect of the Target Corporation.  He is a digital retail transformation specialist that has led the agile, product and technical architecture vision within two iconic retailers, Target and Best Buy.  At Target, he created the Target Retail Platform, which transformed Target from complete outsourced technology to a technology leader in retail.  In his years at Best Buy, he led the rebuilding of BestBuy.com into a cloud centric ecommerce platform, enabling 200% growth over four years.   He is a graduate (B.S. in Electrical Engineering) of Washington University in St. Louis, (M.S., Nuclear Engineering) the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and (M.B.A.) the University of Minnesota.

Dominque Essig

VP and General Manager of Conversational Commerce
Walmart

Dominique (who also goes by Dom) is a creative and passionate product and operations leader with more than 18 years of online experience both in North American and Global product management, customer experience and operations, and software development. She has led and managed the product management, UX design, engineering, data science, IT, analytics and insights, and customer service functions with revenue and cost directed responsibilities.  Currently, Dom oversees the Conversational Commerce team for Walmart. In this role she is responsible for all parts of Walmarts conversational experiences including Voice and Text Commerce. Responsible for changing how people interact and shop with Walmart. 

Dom was previously the Chief Product Officer of Jetblack, a members-only shopping service that was the first portfolio company within Store Nº8, the incubation arm of Walmart. She joined Walmart through their acquisition of Bonobos where she was the Chief Experience Officer. Prior to that she was VP of product and user experience at Gilt Group, and spent 12 years leading product teams at Travelocity. Dominique graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Duke University where she also served as captain of their NCAA Women's Varsity Volleyball team. She currently lives in Larchmont, NY with her husband and two sons.

Anil Lewis

Executive Director
Federation of the Blind

Anil Lewis is currently employed as the executive director for Blindness Initiatives for the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), located in Baltimore, Maryland, he coordinates outreach, marketing, and fund raising activities for a national nonprofit organization. He leads a dynamic team of individuals responsible for the creation, development, implementation, and replication of innovative projects and programs throughout a nationwide network of affiliates that work to positively affect the education, employment, and quality of life of all blind people.  

As the director of Advocacy and Policy for the NFB, Lewis was responsible for a variety of public policy and strategic programs. Most notably, he was the legislative lead of the NFB’s efforts to repeal Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, an obsolete provision that allows employers to pay workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage. As the director of Strategic Communications for the NFB, Lewis coordinated the public relations campaign for the NFB’s Blind Driver Challenge™, an innovative research project to develop nonvisual access technology that made it possible for a blind person to safely and independently operate an automobile.

Noelle Silver Russell

Global Partner, AI and Analytics
IBM

Noelle Silver Russell is a multi-award-winning technologist and entrepreneur who specializes in advising companies on emerging technology, cloud, AI and Web 3.0. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon Alexa, and is a consistent champion for public understanding of the ethical use of AI and tech based on her work building some of the largest AI Models in the world. She is the founder of AI Leadership Institute and serves as an executive at IBM. She was recently awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for Artificial Intelligence as well as VentureBeat’s Women in AI Responsibility and Ethics award.

Ryan Steelberg

President and Co-Founder
Veritone

Ryan Steelberg is a seasoned technology executive and pioneer of digital and data-driven businesses.  He is currently the co-founder and President of Veritone, Inc., a public company on NASDAQ. He also serves on its Board of Directors. Previously, he served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Brand Affinity Technologies, Inc.  Prior to that, Mr. Steelberg served as the Head of Broadcast at Google Inc.  From 2002 to 2007, he was the co-founder and President of dMarc Broadcasting, an advertising company that was acquired by Google Inc. in 2006.  From 1998 to 2000, he served as President and CEO of 2CAN Media, a company that was acquired by CMGi.   From 1995 to 1998 he served as President of AdForce, a company that was also acquired by CMGi in September of 1999, after its IPO earlier that year.

Carter Calle

Messaging & AI Strategy
IHG Hotels & Resorts

Carter has over 20 years of experience as a customer service professional in organizations of various sizes. Most recently, he spent 8 years managing chat strategy and operations first for Time Warner Cable and then at Comcast. He deployed and integrated new chat platforms and chat bots at both companies. At Comcast, he led the effort to expand into messaging in the form of SMS chat. He also led the pilot and eventual deployment of Apple Business Chat. Carter lives in Alexandria, VA with his wife Beth and their two labs. He enjoys travel, cooking, concerts and boating.

Heidi Culbertson

Senior Business Development Manager
Amazon Alexa

Heidi Culbertson is currently the Senior Business Development Manager at Amazon, leading strategic partnerships for Alexa Aging & Independence.  With over 20 years at the forefront of wireless, mobile & the internet-of-things, Heidi is a technology futurist and operating executive who's been a startup founder, a senior executive in growth-stage companies, and directed teams in Fortune 10 organizations launching emerging innovation. Heidi has been honored as a 2018 Voice AI Pioneer at Project Voice, a 2019 Top Influencer and 2020 Top Leader in Product & Design by Voicebot, and a 2021 Global Women in Voice DEI Award nominee. Heidi is a startup advisor, conversation design and product mentor, and sought-after speaker on the future of voice.

Yin-Juei Chang

Lead Experience Researcher
Best Buy

Yin-Juei (pronounced “Ing Ray”) is a research scientist, a leader, a strategic thinker, and an advocate of ethical research. Starting as a neuroscientist and developmental psychologist, her interests in understanding human behaviors have taken her from academia through nonprofit to tech. Her work with adolescents and young adults impacted by cancer has ignited her passion for research around health and wellbeing. She has worked across diverse-age populations - from babies, adolescents, and adults to seniors. Her work at Best Buy as a Lead Researcher has been focusing on health tech for seniors and consumer health. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and a MSc in Neuroscience.

Shruti Murali

Conversation Designer
Instacart

Shruti is a conversation designer at Instacart with degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. At Instacart, she designs thoughtful and empowering chat experiences for customers and shoppers navigating through the app. Prior to that, she was a Design Producer on the Siri and Shortcuts team at Apple, where she delivered interactive conversational experiences, educated designers on data-driven design, and led design sprints.

Greg Bennett

Director of Conversation Design
Salesforce

Greg Bennett is Director of Conversation Design at Salesforce, where he founded and leads the company’s first dedicated Conversation Design practice since its inception. As a sociolinguist, he shepherds a product and design vision at Salesforce that helps teams across the entire product portfolio create inclusive experiences that feel natural, helpful, and meaningful, and manages an international team of Conversation Designers who work with Salesforce’s Product leaders to define the future of conversational AI.

Jordan Mirrer

Director, Interactive Games
Sony Pictures Entertainment

A writer by training, designer by practice, and developer by necessity, Jordan is a leader in the interactive voice space. He initially stumbled into voice design with a little demo project for Jeopardy! that turned into one of the most popular games for Alexa. Jordan went on to build and lead a team at Sony Pictures to produce more voice games for brands including Wheel of Fortune, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Ghostbusters, Barbie, and more. Jordan now leads interactive licensing for Sony's Game Show division with a special interest in emerging platforms.

James Poulter

CEO
Vixen Labs

James Poulter is the former Head of Lego Group’s Emerging Platform team and founder of Vixen Labs and is a leading thought leader and keynote speaker on the future of work, voice technology, conversational artificial intelligence, and social media.

In addition to his work at Vixen, James is the founder of Voice2, the UK’s leading Voice and Conversational Ai Community and previously as Head of The LEGO Group’s Emerging Platforms & Partnerships team as part of the Digital Consumer Engagement division, James pursued new technologies, platforms, and partners to build digital consumer engagement with LEGO customers, shoppers, and consumers on a global basis.

Prior to joining LEGO, James worked for a number of the world’s leading marketing, advertising, and public relations firms including Edelman and Ogilvy leading digital marketing, mobile and social campaigns both in EMEA and globally as well as new business efforts for clients such as Diageo, Unilever, Bose, PayPal, HP, and Adobe.

James is an experienced marketer and communications professional with over 10 years of experience. He previously was the Head of Social Media for LEGO’s social network for Kids, LEGO Life – which launched globally in 2017 and has since grown to over 2m active users regularly posting their content to the world’s first global and safe social network for kids.

As well as devising and developing social features such as LEGO Life’s emoji keyboard, custom characters, and moderation systems, James oversaw the launch of LEGO’s global partnership with GIPHY leading the LEGO channel to accrue over 1 Billion GIF views in its first year.

Olga Howard

Information Architect & Innovation Manager
PBS

Olga Howard is a designer focused on innovation and strategy. In her current role she manages the Metadata for Content Discovery program at PBS where she’s moving the needle towards voice discoverability.

Shyamala Prayaga

Senior Software Product Manager
NVIDIA

Shyamala is a seasoned conversational AI expert. Having led initiatives across connected homes, automotive, and wearables - just to name a few, she's put her work on research into usability, accessibility, speech recognition, and multimodal voice user interfaces, and has even been published internationally across publications like Forbes. Outside of her research, she's spent the last 18 years designing mobile, web, desktop, and smart TV interfaces and has most recently joined NVIDIA to own their roadmap for Speech AI tools.

Evan MacMillan

CEO
Gridspace

Evan has been an entrepreneur most of his life. Previously, he co-founded Zappedy, a payments technology company that was backed by Eric Schmidt's venture fund and acquired by Groupon. His other technology projects have been covered by the WSJ and PBS. Evan's patents include an HCI invention and a bank infrastructure capability. He has an engineering bachelor's from Stanford in Product Design.

Sean King

SVP, General Manager Commercial Enterprise
Veritone

Sean King oversees the Commercial Enterprise division at Veritone including SaaS technologies and managed services for advertising, licensing, synthetic media, and metaverse. His forward-thinking marketing and operational insights have solidified Veritone’s subsidiary, Veritone One as the leading AI-powered audio and influencer advertising agency in the world, and has grown Veritone Licensing as North America’s premiere AI-based content licensing firm — setting the stage to take on the next frontier of synthetic media and metaverse solutions with Veriverse. Over the past 20 years, Sean has held various senior level management positions focusing on sales management, technology operations, and strategic partnership development. He is passionate about finding new ways to refine operations, create new opportunities, and applying practical uses of AI and synthetic media to the metaverse.

Lisa Falkson

Senior VUI Designer
Amazon, Devices Design Group

Lisa Falkson is currently Senior VUI Designer at Amazon, leading a team of VUI designers covering Alexa Communication, FireTV, and new multimodal devices.  She is the editor and author of “Ubiquitous Voice: Essays from the Field” and has over 20 years of industry and research experience, specializing in the design, development and deployment of natural speech and multimodal interfaces.  Her most recent work includes next-generation voice user interfaces at NIO and CloudCar, as well as Amazon’s first speech-enabled products: Fire TV, Fire Phone and Echo/Alexa.  Prior to that, she focused on early iPad/iPhone interfaces at Volio, and speech-enabled IVR applications at Nuance.  Lisa holds a BSEE from Stanford, and an MSEE from UCLA.

Hina Dixit

AI Investments Leader
Samsung Next

Hina Dixit is a Software Engineering Leader with 12+ years of experience in Software Engineering. Hina currently drives all investments in the field of AI at SamsungNext and also focuses on Metaverse sector. Hina led a team at Apple for 8 years with a focus on multiple projects varying from Security, iCloud, Artificial Intelligence, Developer Tools & Data Integrity. From managing a team of seasoned developers to being responsible for bringing up & architecting projects along with the delegation and holding status meetings, Hina was directly responsible for unblocking individuals and finding resources throughout the company to direct the team to succeed. With her experience at Apple as an expert in AI, App Development, Backend & Cloud, she has led various cross-organization projects. Hina holds multiple patents through her work at Apple.

Davar Ardalan

Executive Producer of Audio
National Geographic

Davar Ardalan is National Geographic's executive producer of audio, where she oversees the award winning podcast series, "Overheard”, the narrative limited series "Into the Depths" as well as new forays into spatial audio via Nat Geo's Soundbank. Prior to this, Ardalan was deputy director of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program in Washington D.C. and before that a veteran journalist at NPR News for two decades. In May 2014, Davar was the recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor, for individual achievement and for promoting cultural unity. In Fall 2021, through her work at IVOW, (Intelligent Voices of Wisdom) Ardalan launched a conversational AI scholar on Google Assistant to preserve the wisdom and work of her late mother, Islamic scholar, Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar into 21-century voice technology. In March 2022, Ardalan's team at National Geographic’s Overheard were honored at the Ambies for Best Knowledge, Science and Tech Podcast. The team also won three Anthem Awards in February 2022 and in May 2022, Overheard received a Webby, in the category of Diversity and Inclusion in Podcast.

Ben Allen-Kingsland

Sr. Voice User Experience Designer
Best Buy

Ben Allen-Kingsland is the Senior Voice UX Designer for Best Buy Health, where his projects include voice assistants with a health and safety focus, remote patient monitoring solutions, and personal emergency response systems. He’s designed voice, SMS, and chatbot applications for more than 60 different clients, including a dozen Fortune 100 companies. In addition to his healthcare subject matter expertise, he has designed for many different verticals, including finance, telecom, airlines and logistics. Ben is an award-winning playwright and published author of Fool!, a 415,000-word work of interactive fiction he’s spinning off into an Alexa skill. He lives that WFH life near Washington, DC with his wife and four children. Ben graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University.

Oita Coleman

Senior Advisor
Open Voice Network

Oita Coleman serves as a Senior Advisor to the Open Voice Network (OVON), the open-source community of the Linux Foundation. She is responsible for development of the OVON's privacy, security, and ethical use portfolio, and has led the research and development of seminal papers on these critical topics. Ms. Coleman was previously the Vice President, Research & Development for Software Quality at SAS Institute. She resides in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina.

Kim Johnson

Lead User Experience Researcher
Best Buy

Kim Johnson is a social scientist and Lead UX Researcher at Best Buy, with a specialty in testing voice-activated and AI-assisted interactions with people of all ages. She has conducted research on smart speakers, mobile phone-based voice assistants, both smartphone and flip phone voice activation, including mobile apps, and IVR systems. Prior to this foray into voice-assisted research, she spent the previous 20 years conducting consumer research for online experiences, physical product experiences, and service design. Kim’s passions lie in using exploratory and qualitative research to uncover motivations and unmet needs, and in developing new research processes in innovative spaces. She holds an MA in Sociology.

Ayesha Saleem

Conversation Design Manager
Instacart

Ayesha is a Conversation Design Manager @ Instacart where she leads the strategy for voice AI and chatbots. Prior to Instacart, Ayesha was the first Conversation Designer at Rocket Mortgage where she defined what conversation design looks like in the home loan space. Ayesha has a Masters in Human-Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Michigan and is a proud Detroit native.

Adam Elman

Principal UX Designer (Voice)
Amazon Alexa

Somehow, Adam has been designing voice experiences for over two decades, at Tellme Networks, Microsoft, and now Amazon. He's worked on everything from IVR systems to automotive (Ford SYNC) to gaming (Xbox Kinect) to voice assistants. And it's still just the beginning!

Simon Harrison

SVP and Chief Marketing Officer
Avaya

Simon Harrison is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, leading the global marketing function to engage new and existing customers and partners, drive adoption of the company’s software solutions and support Avaya as the leading player in a dynamic digital communications market.

Simon joined Avaya in 2020 from leading research and advisory firm, Gartner, where he was research director and lead analyst for the Unified Communications and Contact Center market. In a career spanning over 25 years he has been a thought leader, product strategist, marketer and consultant in the communications solutions industry. Prior to Gartner, he held leadership roles in Marketing, Sales, Product Marketing and Product Management for companies like Cirrus, Vocalcom, Siebel Systems and others.

Rupal Patel

VP, Voice and Accessibility
Veritone

Dr. Rupal Patel is an internationally renowned speech scientist turned entrepreneur, bringing decades of clinical, academic, scientific and social entrepreneurship experience to Veritone. As Vice President of Voice & Accessibility, Dr. Patel is responsible for setting strategy and leading innovation efforts in the voice AI space, in addition to expanding the reach and impact of Veritone’s voice solutions for those living with disabilities or inequities. A preeminent thought leader in voice AI, Dr. Patel advocates for ethical transparent and fair use policies that can broaden the monetization capabilities for voice-over artists by leveraging AI. 

Prior to Veritone, Dr. Patel was the Founder and CEO of VocaliD, a voice AI company acquired by Veritone in 2022, that creates synthetic voices with personality for discerning brands that understand the power of customized voice and for individuals living with speechlessness who want to be heard in a voice that is uniquely theirs. VocaliD was a spinout from Dr. Rupal’s research lab at Northeastern University, where she is a tenured Full Professor with interdisciplinary appointments in the Bouve College of Health Science and Khoury College of Computer Science. Named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, Rupal has been featured on TED, NPR, WIRED, and in major international news and technology publications.

Otto Söderlund

Co-Founder and CEO
Speechly

Technology enthusiast and digital tinkerer since a kid, Otto learned to program at the age of 10, ran a BBS (pre-internet website) and was part of the Finnish demoscene revolution. Otto started his studies focusing on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence but was quickly drawn into the startup world. After having done technical work for over a decade Otto pivoted his career to business, studied business strategy and started a career in management consulting advising large European companies on surviving digital disruption and transforming and modernizing their organizations. Soon after Otto founded Magenta Advisory, which he grew to become one of the most successful digital management consultancy boutiques in the Nordics, subsequently sold to BearingPoint. Today Otto is considered an experienced growth entrepreneur with a solid track record of building and growing international digital businesses, and recognized as a digital disruption and transformation expert and advisor. In addition to Speechly, Otto helps and invests in early stage startups leveraging AI technologies to disrupt industries.

Pete Erickson

Founder and CEO
Modev

Pete is a musician and entrepreneur who believes that human connection is vital in the era of digital transformation. Pete founded Modev in 2009 to turn this belief into a mission of bringing the tech industry together. Today, Modev organizes some of the world’s top events, such as VOICE Summit, VOICE Global, All Day DevOps and the Webby Award Winning VOICE Talks with more than 100,000 attendees annually. Modev is a global team of more than 40 creatives, marketers and producers. 

Pete has been a contributor nationally at NPR, CBS, NBC and serves as the on-air “Tech Expert” for Fox 5 DC where he appears regularly to provide commentary on technology news that impacts consumers. 

Pete lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife, two kids and dog Maisey.

Tobias Dengel

CEO
WillowTree

Tobias Dengel is CEO of WillowTree, LLC. a leading mobile strategy, design and app development company servicing Fortune 500/5000 clients and large government agencies. He is a seasoned technology executive with 20+ years experience in Mobility, Digital Media and Interactive Marketing.

Jos Harrison

Jos Harrison Global Head of Brand Experience
Reckitt Plc

I'm obsessed with bringing brands closer to people - in all the ways (big and small) that improve lives, making people happier and healthier.

I design experiences for people, communities and societies - never for 'consumers' - and in doing so, I try to fulfill my responsibility to our planet: protecting and nurturing it in any way I can.

Jeff McMahon

CEO
Voicify

Jeff is co-founder and CEO at Voicify. Jeff has spent over 20 years helping brands connect to their customers using cutting-edge marketing technologies. The common thread throughout his career has been building companies and technology platforms that focus on creating rich customer experiences for digital channels such as voice, web and mobile.

Prior to Voicify, Jeff co-founded and led several organizations from inception through successful exit. Most recently, Jeff was the CEO of Agency Oasis where he led the company’s growth into one of the leading digital agencies in the country with office in Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In addition to his leadership responsibilities at Voicify, Jeff is an active investor, advisor and mentor to several start-up companies in the marketing technology and e-commerce spaces.

Jeff has a BA in Neuroscience from Hamilton College and an MBA from Cornell University.

Ann Thymé-Gobbel

Director - UX/UI Design
Milo

Ann Thymé-Gobbel has focused her career on understanding how people use speech and natural language to communicate with each other and with technology. Currently Director of UX/UI Design for Milo, a wearable handsfree communicator, she's held voice UI and UX roles at large corporations as well as small start-ups. As Head of UX and Design at 22otters, she led the UI/UX design and user research work involved in creating a multi-modal conversational mobile interface for patient self-care. At Nuance, she worked on many client projects, established VUI best practices based on user data, and taught others the ins and outs of voice design. She's been a product development VUI designer at Amazon Lab 126, and she's carried out R&D in language identification, emotion detection, and discourse structure. 

Ann is first author of the book Mastering Voice Interfaces and holds a PhD in Cognitive Science and Linguistics from UC San Diego.

J. Joshua Wilda

Chief Digital & Information Officer
University of Michigan Health-West

More than 12 years of progressive leadership and strategic responsibilities at University of Michigan Health-West, with a focus on managing and improving the delivery of health care. Ensures safety, effectiveness, efficiency and quality. Directs and monitors all operational activities, business plans and budgets. Chair of Senior Executive Operations Committee focused on the day to day operational excellence. Uses design thinking methodologies to build collaborative work teams, with oversight of Business Intelligence and Analytics, Environmental Services, Food Services, Patient Transport, Security, Safety Management Services, Laboratory, Facilities-Construction-Plant Operations, Project Management Office and Information Assurance. Accomplished in bringing information technology solutions to healthcare delivery issues. Instrumental in multiple IT innovations, achievements that consistently earned UM Health-West recognition as HIMSS Stage 7 EMRAM and OEMRAM and as among nation’s “Most Wired” hospitals.

Dr. Monica Lam

Professor of Computer Science
Stanford University

Dr. Monica Lam is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and the Faculty Director of the Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Laboratory. Dr. Monica Lam obtained her BS degree in computer science from University of British Columbia, and her PhD degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. She joined Stanford in 1988.

Professor Lam's current research is on conversational virtual assistants with an emphasis on privacy protection. Her research uses deep learning to map task-oriented natural language dialogues into formal semantics, represented by a new executable programming language called ThingTalk. Her Almond virtual assistant, trained on open knowledge graphs and IoT API standards, can be easily customized to perform new tasks. She is leading an Open Virtual Assistant Initiative to create the largest, open, crowdsourced language semantics model to promote open access in all languages. Her decentralized Almond virtual assistant that supports fine-grain sharing with privacy has received Popular Science's Best of What's New Award in Security in 2019.

Prof. Lam is also an expert in compilers for high-performance machines. Her pioneering work of affine partitioning provides a unifying theory to the field of loop transformations for parallelism and locality. Her software pipelining algorithm is used in commercial systems for instruction level parallelism. Her research team created the first, widely adopted research compiler, SUIF. She is a co-author of the classic compiler textbook, popularly known as the “dragon book”. She was on the founding team of Tensilica, now a part of Cadence.

Dr. Lam is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow.

Anne Ganguzza

Owner
Anne Ganguzza Voice Productions

Anne Ganguzza is a professional voice actor, coach, and award-winning producer with a dynamic presence and a passion for all things voice + technology. She works with talent around the world who are interested in boosting their VO career to the next level, using target-marketed demos and customized marketing strategies in addition to vocal coaching. Her networking group, the VO Peeps, offers meetups and workouts with incredible opportunities for feedback and growth; while her VO BOSS podcast (voboss.com) can be heard weekly around the globe, and highlights prescient industry topics with a fresh take on what’s happening in voice over. Anne's voiceover credits include United Healthcare, Delta, Pearson, Mercedes Benz, PayPal, Wells Fargo, Michelin, Credit Suisse, Cisco, Toyota, Panasonic, Baxter, Xerox, and more...

Tony Lorentzen

SVP and GM Intelligent Engagement
Nuance Communications

Tony has more than 25 years of experience in the technology sector, spending the last 17 with Nuance where he is currently the SVP of Intelligent Engagement Solutions within the Enterprise Division. Before that he served as the leader of several teams at Nuance including Sales Engineering, Business Consulting, and Product Management. A proven leader in working with the cross-functional teams, Tony blends his in-depth knowledge of business management, technology and vertical domain expertise to bring Nuance’s solutions to the Enterprise market, partnering with customers to ensure implementations drive true ROI. Prior to Nuance, Tony spent time at Lucent and Verizon where he led teams that applied the latest technologies to solve complex business issues for large enterprises. Tony received a B.S. from Villanova University and a MBA from Dowling College.

Brandon Marine

Engineer
Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division

Brandon Marine has a Bachelor's degree in Physics from Virginia Tech and Masters degree in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is interested in how the growing field of Artificial Intelligence will coalesce with and ultimately augment aspects of human performance for the Warfighter. Specifically, Brandon is intrigued about our ability to mimic the primary sensory systems to form a more naturalistic way of communicating with automated systems. This notion of human-machine teaming provides many research areas that will guide the future of how we fight and use emerging technologies.

Arte Merritt

Conversational AI Global Segment Lead
AWS

Arte Merritt leads Conversational AI partnerships at AWS. He was the co-founder and CEO of Dashbot, a leading analytics platform for chatbots and voice assistants, which he led to 20,000 customers, 90 billion messages processed, and multiple acquisition offers. He is a frequent author and speaker on conversational AI and data insights. Previously, he founded Motally, a mobile analytics platform he sold to Nokia. Arte is an MIT alum.

Sam Danby

Head of Voice
Boost.ai

Brian Rider

Sr Product Manager
Intuit

Brian is an award winning entrepreneur, product manager, and systems engineer that has dedicated his career toward simplifying work for humans. He’s deployed voice AI experiences across various industries with companies such as Lockheed Martin, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Nvidia, Chick-fil-A, Unity, Barclays, US Bank, Walmart, GTRI, and CDW -- to name a few.

He currently works as a Sr. Product Manager at Intuit. He leads product strategy for the conversational AI designer platform that is utilized by design teams across TurboTax, Quickbooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. The platform contributes to Intuit's overall strategy of being an “AI-driven expert platform” -- using AI to solve the most pressing problems customers face and to deliver awesome experiences.

On a personal level, Brian is passionate about helping entrepreneurs and spent several years working inside developing nations to implement micro-finance systems -- a proven and highly effective method to reduce global poverty at scale. He continues to contribute this passion to Intuit's mission of 'Powering Prosperity Around the World' by developing conversational products that help entrepreneurs and individuals manage & grow their businesses as well as their personal finances.

David Rich

VP of GTM Strategy & Tech Enablement
SoundHound

Dave is responsible for aligning go-to-market strategy and innovation across lines of business. He brings expertise in voice AI, voice biometrics, telecommunications, and multiple industries. Dave has held senior planning and operational roles at American Airlines and Nuance Communications, CEO at LumenVox, and CPO for Flowroute and n2uitive, and has created products that are used by millions of people. He is a frequent advisor to hedge funds and investors. Dave is a Fulbright Scholar and has an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Alex Dunn

Chief Product Officer
Voicify

Alex Dunn leads the product team at Voicify and is the founder of Enabled Play. He's also a Microsoft MVP, PubConf Champion, Bixby Premier Developer, and AWS Alexa SME. His background in accessibility, application development, and conversational AI has leaned into enabling applications to do more for businesses and consumers using scalable architectures and design, distributed services, cloud infrastructure, and innovative edge technologies. Alex does his best to remain platform agnostic in his practices and development with specialties in C#, Kotlin, and TypeScript while building for cross-platform compatibility. You might find him co-organizing the Boston Mobile C# Meetup with Microsoft, speaking at all sorts of conferences and events around the world, streaming on Twitch, and on Pluralsight. You can read his regular tips and thoughts in the development community at https://alexdunn.org/ or watch him live at https://twitch.tv/suave_pirate

Outside technology, you can find him playing guitar, working with animal rescue, or exploring the great outdoors.

Emily Banzhaf

Content Designer
WillowTree

Emily is a content designer at WillowTree, conversation/VUI designer, and professional violinist. She co-moderates the Ethical Use Task Force at the Open Voice Network and co-hosts the Voice Spark Live podcast. Engagements include speaking about voice ethics at VoiceTech Summit Americas and featuring as a Voicefluencer on "The Voice Den." Awards include winning the Digital Assistant Academy's Hackabot 2021.

John Hughes

Accuracy Team Lead
Speechmatics

My team delivers gains in speech recognition accuracy across 30+ languages. Our self-supervised learning and approach to solving long tail issues continues to power the most inclusive voice recognition in the world. I continue to do research alongside managing the team and I’m passionate about deep learning with a focus on self-supervised learning, generative modelling and large scale training.

Jon Stine

Executive Director
Open Voice Network

Jon Stine is the Executive Director of The Open Voice Network, the open-source community of the Linux Foundation dedicated to the development of technical standards and usage guidelines for the emerging world of artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistance.  

Since its founding in June 2020, the Open Voice Network has grown into a global effort powered by more than 200 monthly active volunteers from 13 nations, with Tier 1 enterprise sponsors from Europe and the United States.   It expects this year to publish its first proposed protocols for voice assistant interoperability, as well as guidelines for privacy, security, and ethical use issues specific to voice.

Jon brings to the task more than 30 years of executive leadership in the retail and technology industries.  He led sales of a national apparel brand to better US department and specialty stores before joining the Intel Corporation in 2000 to head its first global outreach to the retail and consumer goods industries.   

He joined Cisco Systems retail-consumer goods consulting team in late 2006, and later headed Cisco’s North America consulting practice for retail-CPG.   In 2014, he returned to Intel as the Global Enterprise Sales General Manager for the retail, hospitality, and consumer goods industries.  He left Intel in 2019 to build The Open Voice Network.

He resides in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Charalampos Doukas

Head of Amazon Connect & Natural Language AI
AWS Professional Services

Charalampos (Harry) Doukas has spent the last five years assisting customers of Amazon to develop conversational experiences on Amazon Alexa, Lex and Amazon Connect. He is currently leading the AWS Professional Services practice for Amazon Connect and Natural Language AI.

Manisha Laroia

Conversation Designer & UX Researcher
IBM

Manisha Laroia is a Product Designer, Digital Technology Researcher & Visual Thinker. She presently works as a Voice UI Designer at IBM. She holds a BDes in Product Design from the NID India and a Master of Design candidate in the Digital Futures program at OCADU. Her practice includes designing technologies informed by user research with a focus on the future of digital technologies and human-machine interactions. Her work ranges across Conversational Interfaces (chatbots and voice-bots), Wearables, Healthcare solutions and Data-privacy research. She likes playing the occasional fly-on-the-wall observing people and making talking bots!

Surbhi Rathore

CEO & Co-Founder
Symbl.ai

Surbhi Rathore is on a mission to democratize conversation understanding  by making it simple to deploy contextual intelligence and analytics across voice, text and video communication, for any stage software. As co-founder and CEO of Symbl.ai, she is bringing to life her vision for a programmable platform built on easy to deploy APIs and SDKs.  With her journey from a software developer to first time founder  and moving to the US to build Symbl.ai, which is now a Series A startup with $24M in venture financing and more scaling with 70+ team across time zones, she is an opportunity creator and believer.

Allen Firstenberg

Google Developer Expert

Allen is a Google Developer Expert for the Google Assistant and other technologies, helping other developers understand how they can apply the skills they already have to this growing technology. He is a Senior Project Engineer at Objective Consulting, co-author of "Designing and Developing for Google Glass", enjoys the history of technology, and has occasionally been known to wear light blue shirts.

Amit Gupta

VP of Product Management, Research and Engineering
Pindrop

Amit is the VP of Product Management, Research and Engineering at Pindrop. As a seasoned technology leader, he has a wealth of experience developing and managing enterprise software. In his prior roles at BMC Software and RSA Security, he has managed product portfolios including products around cloud security, automation and authentication. At Pindrop, he manages the authentication and voice security portfolio.

Kathleen Gavenman

Principal Voice Designer
Amazon

Kathleen Gavenman is a Principal Voice Designer at Amazon, where she focuses on making the lives of Alexa Smart Home customers easier through experiences they couldn’t have imagined - and now can’t live without. Previously, as the writer behind Amazon’s order lifecycle experience, Gavenman created the voice of a personable artificial intelligence that helps customers and support representatives solve problems. Before her time at Amazon, she worked on voice design and UX writing projects for Citrix. She’s also taught Fundamentals of UX at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts, participated in developing the UX Design Certificate at Bellevue College, mentored students at the University of Washington and SVC, and written for aerospace and healthcare.

David Colleen

CEO
SapientX

David Colleen, SapientX's CEO & Co-founder, is a serial AI and VR entrepreneur. In 1995 he co-founded the 3D Metaverse and formed Planet 9 Studios. In 2003, David and his team began building AI-powered conversational characters. In 2016, he launched the SapientX conversational AI platform with long-time friends Bruce Wilcox (4-time Loebner Award winner for best chatbot) and Maclen Marvit (an actual rocket scientist). SapientX has worked with friends who make cars, robots, and all sorts of consumer products including Volvo, LG, Yamaha, NEC, and Mitsubishi.

Diego Castro

Project Manager
ELDORADO Research Institute

Systems Analyst, working with software development for over 10 years. Currently, I work as an innovation project manager focused on disruptive voice solutions for Brazil. Speaker at major technology events in South America.

Audrey Arbeeny

Founder/Executive Producer
Audiobrain

Emmy-award winning Audrey Arbeeny is the CEO and Executive Producer of Audiobrain, which is widely recognized as global leaders in sonic branding. Audiobrain’s iconic sonic branding initiatives include Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Google, Holland America Line, IBM, KIA Motors Corp, Bayer Healthcare, Logitech, Microsoft, Toshiba, and many more. She has been Music Supervisor for 11 Olympic Broadcasts with NBC,

In addition to music and branding expertise, Audrey has significant background in biomusicology and psychoacoustics, and leads many sonic branding initiatives based around health and wellness through the intentional development of music, sound, voice and vibration experiences. 

With 25 years specializing in sonic branding, Audiobrain is at the forefront of emerging technologies, and Audiobrain’s sonic imprints are heard many millions of times every day worldwide. 

An accomplished musician, Audrey taught and lectured on sonic branding at Pratt Institute, and the Masters In Branding Program at School of Visual Arts,. She has appeared in many publications, podcasts and has authored articles on the use of intentional audio.

Galina Reitz

Faculty Director
University of Maryland iSchool

Dr. Galina Reitz is the Faculty Program Director at the College of Information Studies at University of Maryland College Park.  Dr. Reitz has presented her research at venues around the country and internationally, as well as consulted with technology companies on the design of new devices for older persons. Dr. Reitz has published on various topics including Voice Technology in Supporting Older persons with cognitive impairments, Person-Centered Technology and Quality of Life, Narratives of Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment, Supporting Caregivers and Care Recipients after the Onset of Cognitive Impairment with Home Based Technology. Dr. Reitz is also the co-founder of AllWise, a Fintech company focusing on aging and technology.

Heidi Cohen

CMO
Actionable Marketing Guide

Top Global Digital Marketing, Voice Marketing, Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing Influencer, Heidi Cohen runs the award-winning Actionable Marketing Guide and Riverside Marketing Strategies, a marketing consultancy. She has worked with Fortune 100 companies, startups, private equity firms and not-for-profits. 

Heidi enables businesses to meet their audiences’ needs and wants through content, within the context of voice and AI and other evolving technologies. She helps clients to understand and apply actionable tactics to execute their marketing strategies. In the process, she develops consensus and community across organizations to deliver measurable financial results.

Heidi started her career at a local New York City newspaper at age 18, where she learned how media works from the inside. She has helped global organizations like Sony, Citibank, Bertelsmann, The Economist, The New York Times and others to build measurable business value.

As a professor at NYU, CUNY and Rutgers, Heidi has created and taught graduate-level courses in advanced digital marketing, not-for-profit marketing, social media strategy, direct marketing, and finance and analysis for marketers.

Inge De Bleecker

Founder and Conversational UX Consultant
outriderUX

Inge is a UX (user experience) and CX (customer experience) leader, consultant, and author with over 20 years of experience. Inge focuses on strategy, research and design for conversational applications; she believes that it's time to create conversational experiences that customers use and love. 

Inge co-authored the book Remote Usability Testing: Actionable insights in user behavior across geographies and time zones, with Rebecca Okoroji. The pair also created the USERIndex benchmark – a standardized means of measuring the user experience of a digital interface (www.userindex.org). 

Inge is a contributing author at CMSWire and covers customer experience, conversational AI, digital transformation, and inclusive design topics.

Maaike Coppens

VP of Design
OpenDialog

Maaike is an internationally respected conversational product design expert, speaker and author. She has substantial experience in user experience design for startups and major brands including AccorHotels, Groupe SEB, Pierre & Vacances and many more.

She has particular expertise in consumer and voice, consulting on platforms including Amazon Alexa and Google DialogFlow. She has recently also been recognized by Amazon as an Alexa Champion.

Maaike is the co-author of the Voice UX Workbook, and currently finalizing her next book on conversational UX design. 

Maaike joined forces with the amazing team at GreenShoot Labs to lead their design effort, translating their sophisticated conversational experience framework into a valuable, adopted, and useful product: OpenDialog.

Rana Gujral

CEO
Behavioral Signals

Rana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, and CEO at Behavioral Signals, an enterprise software company that develops AI technology to analyze human behavior from voice data.

He founded machine learning SaaS startup TiZE and led TiZE through formative traction until its acquisition by Alchemy. He is an active investor and an advisor to several startups. He’s a contributing columnist at TechCrunch and Forbes. He has been recognized as ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ by CIO Magazine, awarded ‘US-China Pioneer’ by IEIE, listed as a ‘Top 10 Entrepreneur to follow’ by Huffington Post, and an ‘AI Entrepreneur to Watch’ by Inc Magazine. In 2020 he won Hacker Noon’s Noonie’s Award. 

Rana has been a featured speaker at the World Government Summit, Mobile Web Congress, and Voice Summit, among others. He holds degrees in Management, Finance, and Engineering from MIT Sloan, UMass, and TACK U.K. He has also earned a variety of personal and product awards, and his work has been featured in TechCrunch, Forbes, Inc magazine, Huffington Post, Fast Company, NBC, Fox, and CBS.

Shruti Swaminathan

Head of Content
Volley

Armed with an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA and currently working as the head of content at Volley, Shruti is engaging her readers and gamers with her words and storytelling skill. As a visionary for creative writing in voice games, she believes that oral content is the key to a better Conversational AI user experience. Prior to Volley, Shruti was the Director of Creative Strategy at Crazy Maple Studio. She led the new strategies to enhance player engagement with member-exclusive content and diverse background content. Skilled in storytelling through page, stage, screen, and interactive narrative modes, Shruti is dedicated to showcasing each voice game a unique story.

Yared Alemu, Ph.D

Founder/CEO
TQINTELLIGENCE

Dr. Alemu has over 20 years of experience as a psychologist, clinical supervisor, researcher, and administrator. He is an expert in digital mental healthcare and using technology to support precision and individualized treatment approaches to mental health treatment. TQI’s digital mental health solutions address the stubborn disparities in mental health treatment outcomes.

Brenda Leong

Partner
BNH.AI

Brenda Leong is a partner at BNH. Brenda also serves as an adjunct professor at Pennsylvania State University Law School. Previously, Brenda was senior counsel and director of AI and ethics at the Future of Privacy Forum, where she oversaw the development of privacy education, implementation, and analysis of AI and ML technologies for FPF member companies, which include many of the largest companies in the world. She was also the expert voice for FPF on the responsible use of biometrics and digital identity, with a focus on facial recognition, facial analysis, and emerging issues around voice-operated systems. 

Prior to her work at FPF, Brenda served in the U.S. Air Force. She is a 2014 graduate of George Mason University School of Law.

Yoshiaki Yamada

Software Engineer
Cookpad

Software Engineer and Manager at Voice Service Department in Cookpad.

Susan Hura

Chief Design Officer
Kore.ai

Susan Hura, PhD is Chief Design Officer at Kore.ai where she manages a team of conversation design and natural language experts. Susan is a passionate advocate for user-centric conversation design and has deep experience in linguistics, user experience, and speech acoustics. She has built multidisciplinary teams in industry and academia and holds a Doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. Susan founded and managed the Center for User Experience at Intervoice, and was a member of the human factors team at Lucent Technologies Bell Labs. As a faculty member at Purdue University, she co-founded a multidisciplinary team researching novel approaches to speech recognition. For fifteen years, she owned SpeechUsability, a consulting firm that optimized conversational experiences for clients in the travel, financial services, automotive, retail, utilities, telecommunications, and healthcare industries. Susan was Program Chair of the SpeechTEK Conference (2007-2016) and founding President of the Association of Conversational Interaction Design (ACIxD.org).

Susan Westwater

CEO & Co-founder
Pragmatic Digital

Susan Westwater is the CEO and co-founder of Pragmatic Digital where they advise the world’s most innovative brands on how to capitalize on the incredible opportunity voice and conversational AI represent. Susan helps clients reach their marketing objectives by using customer-centric approaches to plan and create innovative voice experiences for their audiences. She has presented and authored a number of talks, workshops, articles, and ebooks focused on the role Voice technology plays in marketing and business strategy. Susan co-authored the book Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences which was a  #1 Release on Amazon and is working on a second book titled Voice Marketing which will be released in 2023. She is also an Ambassador of the Open Voice Network, an instructor for the Marketing AI Institute AI Academy, and a member of Women in Voice. She is recognized by her peers as a thought leader in innovation and voice technology and in 2020, she was recognized as a Top Voice Influencer in Voicebot’s Top 68 Leaders in Voice.

Tim Kahle

CEO and Head of Conversation Design
169 Labs

Tim is co-founder of 169 Labs in Munich and Cologne, the leading German voice assistant agencies. With expertise in UX / UI design he is responsible for the conception, design and marketing of voice applications. Tim is also one of the 2018 batch of Alexa Champions  and named one of the Top 40 Voice AI Influencer by SoundHound.

Roger Kibbe

Senior Developer Evanglist
Samsung

Roger is a senior developer evangelist for Samsung's conversational AI products. He is also a co-founder of Niftorian which is enabling artists to thrive in the world of Metaverse and NFTs.

Rebecca Evanhoe

Conversation Designer & Visiting Assistant Professor
Pratt Institute

Rebecca Evanhoe is an author, teacher, and conversation designer. She co-authored Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice (Rosenfeld, 2021). She teaches conversation design as a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute.

Mark Tucker

Sr. Technical Director
RAIN Agency

Mark Tucker is a Senior Technical Director at RAIN, where he leads technical planning and execution for RAIN’s clients. An Alexa Champion and Bixby Premier Developer, Mark has been an early and frequent innovator in voice and an outspoken member of the global conversational AI community. 

Mark was recently designated as one of the top technologists in voice by Voicebot.ai, and is co-host of the podcast Two Voice Devs.

Mark is the frequent contributor to apl.ninja and creator of various Open Source projects including Speech Markdown, PostAPL, Jovo Community, and ASK Community. 

Maaike Groenewege

Conversation designer, linguist & coach
Convocat conversational AI

Maaike Groenewege is a freelance conversation designer and linguist at Convocat.nl in Hilversum, the Netherlands.  

As a conversation designer, Maaike combines her background in theoretical linguistics, extensive experience in user centered & task-based content, and her passion for the human mind and how we communicate. She works for major Dutch brands like Essent, Independer, CZ and ABN Amro, as well as for international startups. 

Maaike is very active in the conversational community; she is a regular guest speaker, lecturer and host. Recently, she started Convoclub, a platform for knowledge sharing and mentoring specifically aimed at conversation designers.

Jess Thornhill

Director of User Experience
Volley

Jess Thornhill is the Director of Voice User Experience at Volley. She's been working with Amazon Alexa and voice technology since 2016, for multiple startups across the UK and the US. Jess currently leads the design and production of the most popular entertainment experiences on voice platforms, attracting millions of users every month. From trivia games like "Song Quiz" to game show classics like "The Price is Right", Volley’s highly popular games make home entertainment more accessible, engaging and fun.

Jason F. Gilbert

Lead Character Designer
Intuition Robotics

Jason F. Gilbert has been a leader in the field of conversation design and played a key role in the development of the world’s most entertaining chatbots. To name a few:

• “Doc Brown” - The first chatbot ever deployed on Facebook Messenger
• “Miss Piggy”
• “Judy Hopps” - Winner of the 2016 Forbes Award
• “Albert Einstein” - Winner, Genius Award, 2017 Webby Award, Audience Choice, Best Chatbot
• “Murdoc Niccalz” - Winner, 2018 Audience Award, Best Voice Bot
• “DollyBot” - Winner, 2019 LA Social Buzz Award
• His prized jewel “AnnA The Companionship Bot”, won third place for most human-like at the 2019 Loebner competition.
• His skills and creativity have also been instrumental in the design of chatbots for leading brands and enterprises.

Jason is the lead character designer for Intuition Robotics, creators of the social robot ElliQ

Teresa O’Neill

Director of Solutions Architecture - Natural Language Solutions
iMerit

Teresa O’Neill is the Director of Natural Language Solutions at iMerit, where she leads iMerit’s human-in-the-loop data enrichment practice for Speech and Natural Language Understanding use cases. Teresa previously served as Principal Language Architect at OpenCity and helped bring a voice-based conversational AI assistant to market in the hospitality industry. Before moving to the ML/AI space, Teresa worked in academia, where her research and teaching focused on theoretical syntax, grammatical variation in speech, and challenges facing low-resource language communities. She is passionate about embedding human insights in the AI development process to create more useful, accessible, and context-sensitive applications.

Ryan Bales

Director of Engineering, Conversation Intelligence
Invoca

Ryan Bales is the Director of Engineering, Conversation Intelligence  at Invoca.  He’s an active member of the Cleveland technology community, CLE Data Science and R Meetup groups.  Ryan is a content contributor and class facilitator for the Python Data Science course track at DriveIT.  When not writing code or trying to learn more about data science you can find Ryan trying to not lose at online video games.  Ryan lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Robert Sciglimpaglia

Actor/VO Artist/Attorney

Robert has appeared on National Television many times. He is best known as the DAD on the 2012 Chevy SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL, HAPPY GRAD. Robert's very first venture into the acting field was a show called "American Experience: Hijacked!" which aired nationally on PBS-TV and was narrated by Campbell Scott. Since that time, he has appeared in numerous national projects with many big name stars. Besides television, he has done many film projects in leading or supporting roles. Most recently he shot the short films called “Bathtub Chronicles” and "Within and Without" that he produced as well, where he won several best actor awards, and the films have won over one hundred festival awards. He also shot a Sci/Fi project where he is lead actor called ONE, starring opposite LANCE HENRIKSEN ("Aliens, Close Encounters. Millenium), and a horror feature film called “Hillsborough Road” which are in post production. Robert has done on camera or voice overs for many recognizable brand names Perhaps his most prominent VO project to date was as the director of the sessions for BIXBY, the voice of the Samsung Galaxy phones and products. Robert is also the author of the book "Voice Over Legal", which hit NUMBER 1, on the AMAZON BEST SELLER LIST for Entertainment Law Books. Recently Robert has taken on the roles of production attorney, Producer and Executive Producer for several projects as well, and he started a full fledged production company called Belair Productions, LLC.

Nikola Mrkšić

Co-Founder and CEO
PolyAI

Named to Forbes 30 under 30 in 2021, Nikola has worked with his co-founders Shawn Wen and Eddy Su to bring cutting-edge Conversational AI innovations to commercial voice applications. PolyAI is the fastest-growing enterprise voice AI provider, handling millions of customer phone calls with human-like voice automation. Clients include major brands in hospitality, finance, and logistics.

Before starting PolyAI, Nikola was the first engineer at VocalIQ, a dialogue systems startup acquired by Apple. He did his Ph.D. at Cambridge, working with Professor Steve Young. Before that, he did the Cambridge Computer Science Tripos, including a Master's thesis on Bayesian machine learning with Professor Zoubin Ghahramani.

Jodi Krangle

Voice Actor | Podcaster | Media Geek

Jodi Krangle is a Toronto based voice actor who works with major brands all over the world including Dell, BBVA, HGTV, Nespresso & Kraft. She's been heard in thousands of your favorite commercials and on your favorite brand websites too. Her voice has been described as warm, friendly and comforting with a hint of gravitas, and coupled with her years of professional work in sound, will take your project to the next level. On her podcast "Audio Branding", she and her guests offer advice on making an impact with sound and how sound influences us - both in our buying decisions and our daily lives. Being a sought after voice over talent, Jodi understands The Power of Sound. Follow her on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & Clubhouse and check out her website at https://voiceoversandvocals.com.

Jim Kennelly

Founder/Owner
Lotas Productions

For over 30 years, Jim Kennelly has specialized in finding the right voice for all kinds of media. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, Jim traveled microphone-in-hand with documentary crews to the world’s hot spots, covering political, social, and humanitarian events. Back in New York City, he worked his way up from engineer, to director, to producer, to owner of Lotas Productions, where he enjoys an international reputation for honest insight and positivity in the voiceover industry.

A staple of both the Big Apple and the ad game, Jim and Lotas Productions have learned to navigate and adapt to the rapid changes impacting the voiceover industry. From the globalization of spots, to the direct hire boom, and point-to point connectivity technologies that bring clients and talents together worldwide, Jim has worked diligently to stay ahead of the curve and be a reliable business partner.

Outside the studio, Jim enjoyed a 20-year stint in the NY Show-Biz softball League, and was a youth sports coach and mentor. Today he works with those living with Alzheimer’s and dementia, enjoys a bit of good poetry, and remains an avid college sports fan - go Orange!

Joseph Tyler

Founder
Tyler Consulting, LLC

Joseph designs, builds, and delivers multi-modal conversational interactions for mobile, web and chat interfaces. This includes dialogue design, NLP, content strategy, analytics and dashboard design, voice/VUI/speech, and managing translation and localization. He writes a lot of SQL, builds dashboards, and builds out conversation platform capabilities. Previously, as an academic linguist (PhD, postdoc, prof), he researched speech and conversation/discourse, and taught college linguistics and English composition.

Ken Brizel

CEO
ACAMP

Ken Brizel, CEO of ACAMP with 38 years’ experience in managing and developing advanced technology products and organizations. An international executive, operational experience in public and private corporations. Hands-on leader, mentor with extensive operational background strategy, business development, planning, team building, sales, marketing, engineering, operations and manufacturing. Previously served as CEO LightPath Technologies NASDAQ listed public company also served as a Senior Vice President for Strategy & Business Development at Oplink Communications and at AT&T Bell Labs/Lucent Microelectronics, Director of Strategic marketing for Infrastructure Products and Product line Director for Consumer Digital Signal Processors. Ken has worked in two start-ups, one sold and the other went public, trained in business at GE’s corporate Crotonville global leadership institute.

Ken holds a Master’s Degree and Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and concentration in solid state physics from RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and was awarded the prestigious David Sarnoff Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement at RCA Corporation.

Frank Schneider

CEO
Speakeasy AI

CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy AI; 20+ years in contact center & AI consulting; basketball coach. Frank has been featured on pods & events including VUX World, Sales Tuners, Active Listening Podcast, SpeechTek, Gilbane, Digital CX, CX Connect, CRM Exchange, Forrester CX, IIEX North America, IIEX Europe & Voice 2019.

Simon Kingaby

Author and Innovator (Alexa), Data Mover (ETL, SQL), Code Monkey (C#, Python)

Simon Kingaby has been writing code and moving data for over 30 years. In the last few years, he’s been creating Alexa skills. Last year, he landed his dream job as the voice skill developer for the Deloitte Assistant (DA) team. DA is the internal-use chatbot. In 2021, Apress published Simon's first book, Data-Driven Alexa Skills.

Justin Nikolaus

Lead Voice Designer
Amazon Alexa

Justin Nikolaus is a Senior Voice Designer at Amazon and has been designing voice interfaces for the last 8 years. In college, he studied both graphic design and computer science. He has always been drawn to the intersection of art and technology and how it can be used to help and connect people. Before joining Amazon, Justin worked for a handful of companies, including Thomson Reuters, Target, and Microsoft. He also co-founded a small startup. He's originally from Wisconsin, but for the last ten years, he has lived in Seattle with his wife and two sons. When he's not reading up on the latest space tech, he's out playing tennis, wine tasting, or at home putting his pizza oven to use.

Benjamin Brown

VP Marketing
ConverseNow

Benjamin Brown serves as Vice President of Marketing at ConverseNow, the leading voice AI platform for quick service restaurants to automate drive-thru and phone orders. Ben’s team is driving thought leadership to shed light on the fast-growing category of voice AI, empowering top QSR brands and franchise owners with the tools they need to enhance guest experience, support restaurant staff and strengthen growth. 

Dedicating his career to the intersection of hospitality and technology, Ben has led digital experience at Carnival Corporation and MGM Resorts International, as well as worked with restaurant and hotel groups across nearly 60 countries. He currently resides in San Diego, CA.

Deborah Dahl

Principal
Conversational Technologies

Deborah Dahl works on innovative, practical and scalable conversational systems that push the boundary between theory and applications. She is the Principal of Conversational Technologies, which assists its clients in creating state of the art solutions using speech and natural language, technologies. Her clients include startups, large enterprises and government organizations. She has written many technical papers and three books, including Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Toward Natural Interfaces to Everything, published in 2016.

Dominik Meissner

CEO & Co-Founder
169 Labs

Dominik is co-founder of 169 Labs in Munich and Cologne, the leading German voice assistant agencies. He is responsible for voice strategy and technology. The company released more than 50 voice applications for different brands and worked on some of the most successful voice apps today.

Gwen Morrison

Partner, Candezant Advisory, and Senior Advisor
Open Voice Network

Gwen's career is focused on the intersection of retail experience, brand activation and innovation. As CEO for WPP's Global Retail Practice for 15 years, Gwen helped clients and agencies navigate the dynamic retail environment driven by digital transformation  and shopper adoption of technologies. She has worked with major international brands across Retail formats, CPG, QSR, Financial Services, Travel and Automotive.

A frequent speaker at NRF and CES,  she advises retail tech start-ups and is an Endeavor Mentor.  A Senior Ambassador to Open Voice Network , she also contributes to publications on Innovation and  Voice from both a customer perspective and as a business driver. These include HBR, Journal of Brand Strategy and The Robin Report.

Gwen is a partner with Candezent Advisory, a global partnership of industry experts that help businesses transform for growth and is an Iterate.ai Advisor.

Dan Turchin

CEO
PeopleReign

Entrepreneurial leader passionate about building great teams that build great products that solve hard problems that change lives.

Early-stage investor in enterprise software always interested in helping and learning from technologists and entrepreneurs improving the employee experience with data-driven, SaaS platforms.

Every once in a while magic bytes disrupt, transform, and inspire. I want a front row seat when they do.

Brendan Lewis

President
RealThing AI

Brendan Lewis is the President of RealThing Ai.  He is sought after for his broad commercial insight, global network and get it done approach.   He has run an advertising agency, commanded an armored reconnaissance troop and written software for a living.  He holds undergraduate qualifications in Commerce & Computing and postgraduate qualifications in Accounting & Finance.  He has undertaken executive education at Harvard Business School and Kellogg School of Management.

Brian Crannell

Sr Vice President: Strategy + M&A + Voice UI and Audio / ML Solutions
Knowles Corporation

Brian Crannell is senior vice president, corporate development, responsible for developing and driving Knowles’ strategic growth plans and merger and acquisition activities. His track record in developing growth strategies, executing acquisitions, and implementing product and technology initiatives are key enablers to Knowles’ growth goals.

Prior to his current role, Brian led the marketing and business development activities for Knowles’ Specialty Components – Acoustics and Hearing Health business units for four years. He successfully implemented growth strategies for MEMS in hearing health and performance audio segments, respectively, which continue to deliver strong results. 

Before joining Knowles, Brian was with Littelfuse, Inc. from 1997 to 2011. He held corporate development, financial planning, marketing and product management roles, and resided for a period in China with his family. He successfully completed acquisitions in China, Taiwan, Germany, Canada and the US. Prior to Littlefuse, Brian held design engineering and product management roles at Masco Corporation. 

Brian received his Juris Doctor law degree from Loyola University, Chicago, and Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Dayton in Ohio. He holds a legal license in Illinois, and is registered with the USPTO as a patent attorney. 

Brian and his family live in the Chicago area. He is a former board member of the Association for Corporate Growth, where he continues to be active, and donates his time to multiple community organizations.

Brian Tarbox

Freelance Alexa Skiller Developer
Wabi Sabi Software

AWS Community Hero, Leader of the Boston AWS MeetUp, 3x AWS Certifications, 10 US Patents, dozens of publications, 2010 Java One award for most innovative use of Java for a system to turn log files into music.

Eros Marcello

Sr. Conversational AI Designer, Einstein Artificial Intelligence
Salesforce

I design + architect cognitive personification for human-interfacing Artificial Intelligence, including Conversational UIs, Ambient UX and Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction. My design acumen is calibrated by an acutely seasoned technical prowess, and vast comprehension of the fundamental technology that powers bleeding-edge experiences. From Samsung to Royal Caribbean to ServiceNow, I’ve done work in every vertical and industry that the Conversational AI medium touches. I’ve been featured in Forbes for my efforts in this domain, and have put forth best practices in conjunction with refined approaches to conceptualizing impactful AI-navigated products and services that generate immediate ROI, procure habitual use and most importantly, illicit granular, actionable data from end-users which can be propagated throughout any organization.

Joana Sousa

Innovation Consultant

Joana Sousa holds an MSc in Biomedical Engineering with expertise in the areas of biosignal processing, innovation management and marketing strategy. Currently, she is Innovation Consultant at NOS Innovation, a Portuguese telecommunications company, and an independent expert in the European Community’s H2020 framework, which provides funding for research and innovation. She was Innovation sub-director at Edge Innovation, leading innovative projects and managing innovation in the Health, IT, communications areas, and R&D project coordinator at PLUX–Wireless Biosignals, AS.

Jasmin Cowin

Assistant Professor and TESOL Practicum Coordinator
Touro University

Dr. Cowin is a Fulbright Scholar and full-time faculty at Touro University. As an Education Policy Fellow at the EPFP™ Institute, Columbia University/Teachers College, she became part of a select group of strategic leaders analyzing effective educational policy and leadership trends. Her research focuses on Simulations, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Avatars, Teacher Training, and The Metaverse: Educational Use Cases. She is a member of  Holo Sail Technologies, Inc., a disruptive "Tech" startup using patented advancements in technology and in-house AI. Her pro-bono work focuses on ‘Train the Trainer' for Future Horizons Foundation for Translation, Training, and Development, Sanaa, Yemen. In addition, she serves as a Sustainability Advisor for Computer for Schools Burundi, Burundi.

John Campbell

Managing Director
Rabbit & Pork

John founded Rabbit & Pork as the fourth agency and Voice Experience arm of TIPi Group. John has developed and launched several Google Actions and Skills, presented at several voice events around the world, spoken on the VUX podcast and authored multiple whitepapers.

Ethan Richardson

Conversational Developer
Cashew.ai

A seasoned developer and designer of technology solutions spanning over 10 years working in many countries around Europe. Worked in the conversational ai arena for 4 years with major brands and agencies. Specialises I’m developing user interfaces for voice and smart speakers with screens.

David McKeague

Co-Founder
Curious Thing

David is a Co-Founder of Curious Thing which is leading the way you engage with your customers using voice-based conversational AI. David is serial tech entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience building technology businesses.

Joe Hagan

Chief Product Officer
LumenVox

Joe Hagan, LumenVox chief product officer, is responsible for the company’s product portfolio. For more than 20 years, Joe has directed high performing product management, strategy, and marketing teams across a diverse set of technology companies. Prior to joining LumenVox, Joe worked with Aspen Technology, where he was instrumental in restructuring the software simulation portfolio to better serve large enterprise customers. Joe's experience enables him to effectively build and grow high-value software products, implement robust marketing technology platforms, and restructure product roadmaps so they meet the needs of global customers.

Praveen Kumar Sattarapu

Accountable Marketing Expert

Propagating accountable marketing is my main focus. This comes from two practices in MarCommTech - Invest and Measure (the impact of those investments) at 2 global firms (WPP & Omnicom) over 2 decades. I have been fortunate to learn, implement and share these practices in developed as well as developing markets in the Asia Pacific and gained global experience in the process.

Michael Novak

Sr. Responsible AI Advisor
Open Voice Network

Michael is an metaverse certified executive helping enterprises leverage Web3 technologies to make better business decisions, drive revenue growth, and increase operational efficiency.

He is a Senior Responsible AI Advisor for the Open Voice Network. He produces quarterly meetings and contributes to Privacy and Ethics working group papers on privacy, accessibility, and digital identity in consumer, enterprise and smart cities.

He is active in a public private policy organization, ACT-ACT Emerging Technology Center of Excellence. He authored sections of the Safety, Privacy, Security in an AI-Enabled World whitepaper and a response to NIST Artificial Intelligence and User Trust (NISTIR 8332).

A member of the Government Blockchain Association, he also taught a section to business students on Web3, blockchain, NFT's, and cryptocurrency at a local university.

Patricia Scanlon

Founder & Executive Chair
SoapBox Labs

Dr. Patricia Scanlon is the Founder and Executive Chair of SoapBox Labs, the world's leading provider of proprietary voice technology for children. Dr. Scanlon holds a PhD and has over 20 years’ experience working in speech recognition technology, including at Bell Labs and IBM. An acclaimed TEDx speaker, in 2018 Dr. Scanlon was named one of Forbes "Top 50 Women in Tech" globally. In 2020, she was ranked 6th of 17 global "Visionaries in Voice” by industry leading publication Voicebot.ai. In May 2022, Dr. Scanlon was appointed as Ireland’s first AI Ambassador.

Inspired by her oldest child and her background as a speech engineer, Dr. Scanlon founded SoapBox Labs in 2013 to redefine how children interact with technology using their voices. SoapBox Labs’ proprietary voice engine is now the leading voice solution for kids ages 2 - 12 across the education and entertainment industries globally. The company is based in Dublin, Ireland, and has a world-class team of over 30 employees.

Naeem Komeilipoor

Founder/CTO
AAVAA

Naeem Komeilipoor is a successful scientist and entrepreneur, with 10+ years of research in Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering, and Machine Learning to assess and improve human health. While working at universities around the world, Naeem developed a deep understanding in signal processing and AI to extract valuable information from the complex signals of the brain and body. Naeem founded his latest venture, AAVAA, where he leads the team of engineers and scientists, and is responsible for the strategic intellectual property portfolio, including acquiring and filing several critical patents.

Michael McTear

Emeritus Professor
Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK

Michael McTear is an Emeritus Professor at Ulster University with a special interest in spoken language technologies. He has been researching in the field of spoken dialogue systems for more than 20 years and is the author of several books, including Spoken Dialogue Technology: Toward The Conversational User Interface (Springer, 2004), Spoken Dialogue Systems (Morgan and Claypool, 2010), with Kristiina Jokinen, The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices (Springer, 2016), with Zoraida Callejas and David Griol, and Conversational AI ( Morgan & Claypool 2020). Michael has delivered keynote addresses and tutorials at many academic conferences and workshops, including SpeechTEK, Conversational Interaction, ProjectVoice, REWORK AI Assistant Summit, and the European Chatbot Conferences. Currently Michael is involved in several research and development projects investigating the use of conversational agents in socially relevant projects such as mental health monitoring, and home monitoring of older persons.

João Paulo Alqueres

Founder
Iara Digital

Prior to launching his voice agency Iara Digital amidst a global pandemic (while fathering three kids), Joao Paulo Alqueres spent fourteen years as a consultant. Today, besides being an entrepreneur and a Certified Alexa Skill Builder, Joao co-hosts a podcast where he interviews pioneers of the internet and voice. Joao also extensively supports and fosters the no-code Voice Community to make skill building even more accessible to everyone. In Brazil, Joao has positioned himself as an innovator spearheading the local market evolution, pioneering interactive stories, voice commerce, health-related voice apps, and voice games. Clients include Universal Studios, Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

Christoph Börner

Co-Founder and CEO
Botium

In a few words - entrepreneur, developer, tester, keynote speaker and drummer. Active member and organizer in the testing community. Deep interest in artificial intelligence, machine learning and chatbots from day one. Close friendship with Florian, even after playing in the same rock band for several years :). Started together developing the open source Botium Core in 2018 to reinvent automated testing for chatbots. Today Botium can be considered as the first choice for testing and training conversational AI.

Amany Alkhayat

Doctoral candidate
Columbia University, Teachers College

Amany is an educator, researcher, Voice User Interface designer, author, and teacher trainer. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in the Instructional Technology and Media program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She’s also the Social committee Chair at the Immersive Learning Research Network. She founded the VirtuaTELL conference at NYS TESOL in 2021 that brings together educators, practitioners, researchers, and passionate enthusiasts to work together to integrate emerging technologies into education. Her research interests include conversational AI, Extended Reality for education, immersive storytelling, intelligent NFTs and decentralized autonomous organizations.