Laura Rosenbaun

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.

Aniket Deosthali

Head of Product (Conversational Commerce)eri
Walmart

Bio to come.

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.

Raj Tumuluri

CEO
Openstream

Raj is an inventor and one of the pioneers in the industry with 20+ years of experience in building context-aware, multimodal and mobile technologies; principal architect & evangelist of Openstream’s product vision & strategy; Co-Author of W3C standards on Multi-modal & Speech standards & W3C Automotive Web.

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

Sr. Manager, User Research & Health Equity
Teladoc Health

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. 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.

Bret Kinsella

CEO and Founder
Voicebot.ai

Bret Kinsella is CEO and founder of Voicebot.ai, the leading source of research, data, analysis, and news about voice, AI, and synthetic media technologies. Bret has been named Voice AI commentator (2019-21) and analyst of the year (2020-21). He earned degrees from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Gina Riley

Vice President, UX & Conversation Design Lead
JPMorgan Chase

Jess Boucher

Lead Technical Writer, Einstein Bots
Salesforce

Jess Boucher is the Content Strategist and Lead Writer for the Einstein Bots team. Her superpower is explaining cutting-edge tech to new audiences in ways that are approachable and engaging. With over a decade of Salesforce experience, Jess spends her days empowering customers to launch their own bots using the power of the Salesforce platform. She has a background in Instructional Design and serves as the liaison between Salesforce’s conversation designers and hundreds of writers.

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.

Sara Taheri

VP Chief Product Owner
Prudential

Sara is the Chief Product Owner for Contact Center Transformation and Robotics in Prudential. In this role, Sara has overall vision, strategy, and execution responsibility for transforming the contact center capabilities to one with increased focused on customers through intelligent call routing, conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital self-service options and chat to name a few.

Prior to joining Prudential, Sara held various leadership roles at MassMutual Financial Group for more than 14 years with a focus of digitizing and improving customer experiences. These initiatives included capabilities like, Conversational AI, Algorithmic Underwriting, Fluid-less underwriting, Electronic Health Data, eDelivery and Robotics.

Sara received her Bachelor of Commerce Degree in Computing & Information Systems from Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada.

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 Conversation Designer
Amazon Alexa

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.

Chris Seifert

Expressions Design Manager
Amazon Alexa

As an original member of the Alexa and Echo Design teams, Chris has defined and developed the personality and sound of Alexa and the non-verbal audio cues that accompany the voice. Currently, Chris leads the Expressions Design Group which includes Voice, UX Writing, Visual, Motion, and Sound Design within Amazon's Device and Services Org.

Kevin Fredrick

Managing Partner
OneReach.ai

Kevin Fredrick is a Managing Partner at OneReach, where he works with companies to offer effective customer support over SMS. His passion for technology and the study of human interactions has led him to a career in customer experience management. With over 10 years experience in sales and product management, Kevin is a skilled leader and manager whose expertise spans several industries. Kevin has an MBA from the University of Denver.

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.

Raghu Ravinutala

CEO and Co-Founder
Yellow.ai

Raghu Ravinutala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Yellow.ai (formerly known as Yellow Messenger), a leading enterprise-grade Conversational AI platform, enabling enterprises to unlock business potential at scale.

Since its inception, Raghu and his team have successfully expanded Yellow.ai’s presence across the U.S.,Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Japan, Australia and Latin America with 1000+ customers in 85+ countries.
The entrepreneurial bug had been conceded deep inside him for long before he co-founded Yellow.ai in 2016, with a vision to make customer and enterprise interactions more effective and effortless.

Previously, Raghu worked for 16 years with leading tech companies such as Texas Instruments, and Broadcom across leadership roles in Engineering, Product Management and Business Development both in the Bay Area and India. He is also an elected member of the NASSCOM Executive Council 2021-23 and a member of the Forbes Tech Council. Raghu has been recently
recognised as the CX Leader of the Year at the CX Awards 2022, organized by CX Today (US).

Raghu is an alumni of NIT Warangal, India where he completed his B-Tech in the year 2000. He enjoys a game of squash every now and then and believes in practicing an active lifestyle.

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.

Kane Simms

Founder
VUX World

Tarran Corbett-Drummond

VP, Partners and Ecosystem
Ericsson Digital Human

Tarren leads Partnership and Ecosystem development for Ericsson Digital Human Platform. With over 10 years of experience in telecommunications, with the majority of that time focused on innovation, Tarren likes to focus on tip of the spear technology that will unlock new end-user experiences. After joining Ericsson in 2018 as a product innovation lead, she led the team working alongside AT&T in their joint innovation centers where Digital Humans was born.  

Before joining Ericsson she was part of AT&T’s leadership development program where she lead network services teams, managed 55 retail stores, worked in retail operations, and created thought leadership programs. Tarren completed her MBA from UC Davis after a three year commitment to teaching in Los Angeles with Teach for America. Tarren resides in Northern California with her husband and two children.

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.

Cobus Greyling

Chief AI Evangelist
HumanFirst

Until recently Cobus was the Product Owner of Vodacom TOBi Voicebot in South Africa, from inception to full production launch.  Which was part of a larger Vodafone initiative.  For the last six months he has been doing research and writing on the current Conversational AI landscape, focussing on Large Language Models and Development Frameworks.

Ian Utile

CEO
Attn:Live

Ian Utile believes that humanity is thriving in new ways because of technologies like NLP and NFTs. As a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for 20+ years, he and his teams have launched seven companies together.

One of their start-ups, Kukui, was acquired by a PE firm in 2019 after exceeding $10M ARR bootstrapped. Because of their 3,943% growth rate, Kukui was ranked by the Inc. 5000 as the #1 fastest growing private company in San Jose. Ian’s ancestor, José Joaquin Moraga, founded the City of San Jose in 1777. This unique heritage is a great inspiration to Ian.

Today, he’s focused on co-producing events like NFT.NYC as well as creating wealth for content creators and their communities with attn.live’s NLP/NFT “Sonic Streaming” platform. Ian lives in Santa Cruz, CA inside a treehouse with his two sons (Malakye 12, Kenton 9). Connect with Ian directly on all social media sites @ianutile or @attnlive.

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!

Brandon Kaplan

Chief Innovation Officer
Journey

Obsessed with technology from a young age, Brandon Kaplan has worked in and started tech focused businesses, working on the cutting edge of emerging channels.  Brandon spent 10 years working in tech manufacturing before moving into creative services, eventually founding Skilled Creative, a best in class Conversational AI Agency.  Skilled Creative was acquired in 2022 by Journey, an Innovation Consultancy, where Brandon now acts as Chief Innovation Officer.

Carolyn Laffan Miller

Sr. Director, Avaya Executive Briefing Centers
Avaya

Carolyn leverages her background in engineering, solution consulting and management roles at Avaya, Lucent and AT&T, so she can relate how to reinvent the engagement experience and customer journey, address customer business challenges and drive better business models. Carolyn is adept at explaining how the composable enterprise is best suited to capitalize on big data and break down the silos around traditional analytics tools while delivering experiences that matter to customers and employees. Carolyn received her B.E. in Electrical Engineering from
Stevens Institute of Technology and her MBA in Marketing and Finance from NYU Stern School of Business.

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.

Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Pediatric Endocrinology
Vanderbilt University

Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). Dr. Kumah-Crystal’s research focuses on studying communication and documentation in healthcare and developing strategies to improve workflow and patient care delivery.

Dr. Kumah-Crystal is the project lead for the Vanderbilt EHR Voice Assistant (VEVA) initiative to incorporate voice user interfaces and  ambient scribe technology into the EHR through Natural language processing. Dr. Kumah- Crystal is the HealthIT Clinical Director for the VUMC Telehealth Taskforce and works to  develop and implement strategies to leverage remote patient care models. She remains clinically active and also supervises pediatric residents and fellows. Dr. Kumah-Crystals related publications define the use of technology to improve care and communication for providers and patients.

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.

Braden Ream

CEO and Co-Founder
Voiceflow

Braden Ream is the CEO and cofounder of Voiceflow, the collaborative platform to design, prototype and build chat or voice assistants. Voiceflow is used by 100,000 global teams including JP Morgan, Google, Amazon, US Bank, Instacart and more. To date Voiceflow has raised $27M USD from Craft Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Google, True Ventures, the founders of Figma, InVision, Eventbrite and more.

Scott Leatherman

Chief Marketing Officer
Veritone

Currently, Scott Leatherman is the CMO of Veritone (VERI), a leading AI platform and application company that won back-to-back product of the year awards for Synthetic Voice and Avatars at the NAB conference. Previously, Scott was COO of SAP Labs US and was the first GTM Lead for SAP HANA and built the first HANA marketplace for SAP. Before SAP, Scott worked in several startups for over a decade, focusing on MarTech, Security, and Compliance.

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.

Joti Balani

Founder and Managing Director
Freshriver.ai

Joti Balani, founder of Freshriver.ai, is a creative architect designing and delivering complex enterprise, human and systemic transformations with her multidimensional framework blending AI, Data Science, Engineering and Social Sciences. She leads transformative innovations at Fortune 100 enterprises to create emotional, economic and brand value with her team, who represent the empowered human race in all dimensions

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.

Miles Woodroffe

Global CTO
Cookpad

A hands on technology leader with 20+ years experience building startups, teams and products from the ground up in the US, Japan and UK, and from zero to hundreds of millions of users.

Started building Alexa Skills in 2017 - speaking at conferences internationally on the topic in 2018 - and for the last year been very involved with developing and expanding the Cookpad Alexa services in multiple regions.

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.

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.

Dr. Brandy McNeil

Director of Adult Services
The New York Public Library

 Dr. Brandy McNeil is an award-winning innovator who focuses on community needs to build successful adult education programs in the 88 branches under her stewardship across NYC as the Director of Adult Services for The New York Public Library. Dr. McNeil has established partnerships with Apple, Spotify, Google, & Microsoft to name a few, in an effort to help her mission of assisting underserved communities in ensuring equitable access to technology, knowledge, and opportunity. Dr. McNeil is also a contributing writer of the book titled Libraryland; It's All About The Story published in 2020. She holds a Doctorate in Business and an M.B.A. in Entrepreneurship and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Public Library Association. In her spare time, she is an entrepreneur, consultant, and motivational speaker.

Shiv Rao

Co-Founder and CEO
Abridge

Shiv Rao, MD is the CEO of Abridge, a company that empowers patients to securely record, review, and share their health care. Shiv co-founded Abridge with Florian Metze PhD, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute, and Sandeep Konam, a former master’s student in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon.

Shiv was previously an Executive Vice President at UPMC Enterprises, where he managed the provider facing portfolio of technology investments and R&D. He is also a faculty member and practicing cardiologist in UPMC’s Heart and Vascular Institute. He received his BA from Carnegie Mellon University and completed his medical training at the University of Michigan and University of Pittsburgh.

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...

Steve Xeller

Chief Revenue Officer
Stats Perform

Steve is the Chief Revenue Officer at Stats Perform, focused on driving global revenue growth through coordinated sales and marketing initiatives, while working hand-in-hand with Stats Perform’s growing Customer Success team. Steve joined Stats Perform in 2018 with over 20 years of experience building and leading global sales teams for a variety of software companies, most recently serving as the Executive Vice President of International Sales at MicroStrategy. Steve holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Fairfield University.

AJ Assaadi

VP, DEI Corporate Partnerships
United Spinal Association

AJ works with tech industry partners to engage with United Spinal Association’s Tech Access Initiative focused on accessible and inclusive design leveraging consumer insights from the mobility disability community, primarily wheelchair users. Tech Access offers a formalized pathway to engage with a diverse spectrum of testers through focus groups and surveys to elicit noteworthy and meaningful customer insights that drive innovation, access and demand. Founded in 2020, Tech Access is a groundbreaking collaboration between its Tech Access Group (TAG), comprised of diverse wheelchair using tech thought leaders and influencers, and its Tech Access Council (TAC) corporate technology partners.

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.

Alex Dubois

VP of Growth
HumanFirst

VP of Growth @ HumanFirst, helping businesses build better NLU applications at scale.

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

Nova Bhojwani

Chief Revenue Officer
Tetrasoft

Nova Bhojwani is an accomplished Strategy and Business Leader with 22+ years of successful track record in defining business strategy, growth channels, P&L responsibility for corporations with specific focus on business transformation focusing on next generation technology, operational and commercial excellence. He is currently responsible for developing and driving Tetra groups strategic growth plans as their Chief Revenue Officer. Nova has keen interest in Conversational AI, Enterprise scale Intelligent platform implementation along with Blockchain and Web3, key elements for a successful digital transformation and enriching customer journey. He is an active participant in industry leadership groups like Advisory Board Member for Rutgers Digital Innovation Program and CIO leadership workshops conducted by Columbia University. He is a certified McKinsey Change Leader.

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.

Sam Zegas

VP of Operations
Deepgram

Sam Zegas is life-long language aficionado, with years of study in linguistics and foreign languages, and leads language and data operations at Deepgram. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

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.

Dr. David McGee

VP Engineering
Openstream

Dr. David McGee’s passion is turning novel ideas into products that empower people. He is a successful founder, innovator, and software executive who has been shipping multimodal and conversational AI products for the past two decades by building world-class engineering teams. Prior to joining Openstream.ai®, David was the product leader at Cerence for “Look”: the first multimodal automotive product combining simultaneous, multi-sensory spoken and gaze inputs so that drivers may ask more direct questions about places in their surroundings. (Mercedes Travel Knowledge) In addition to Cerence, David was the CTO at Adapx before leading teams at Voicebox and Nuance.

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.

Peter Isaacs

Conversation Designer
Woolworths

Peter Isaacs is a Full-Stack Conversation Designer at one of Australia’s largest retailers. Here he designs experiences for chat, IVR and Google Assistant applications. Peter has a keen interest in using customer data to predict a user's intent and is passionate about evolving conversation design into a fully-fledged practice, with specialisation across all verticals.

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.

Meghraj Mookerji

AVP & Head of Marketing
Openstream

Meghraj is the chief storyteller at Openstream.ai. He designs thoughtful and empowering marketing campaigns with care and focus on customers and employees. Meghraj enjoys meeting with customers and learning what will make them successful while also consistently improving Openstream's go-to-market strategy to generate quantifiable commercial value. He is now concentrating on creating interesting content that articulates Openstream's cutting-edge end-user experiences supported by thought leadership and utilizing Openstream's long history of academic research in Conversational AI. Meghraj has over 17 years of extensive experience working with governments and Fortune 500 companies in a variety of customer-facing roles. He is a firm believer in the amazing potential that Conversational AI holds for improving human lives through authentic human-computer interactions.

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.

Raj Koneru

Founder and CEO
Kore.ai

Raj Koneru is the Founder and CEO of Kore.ai, a market-leading conversation AI platform and solutions company. He drives Kore.ai’s vision and strategy for building Kore.ai’s no-code experience optimization platform and solutions to help global enterprises in their digital transformation journey through enriching customer, employee, and agent experiences.
 
For over 30 years, Raj is a successful serial entrepreneur who is at the forefront of innovative technology solutions for global enterprises. Before starting Kore.ai, Raj was the founder and CEO of Kony, the market leader in a cloud-based mobile app development platform that was acquired by Temenos. Prior to that, his other successful companies include iTouchPoint, Seranova, and Intelligroup of which two made IPO at NASDAQ.
 
Raj is frequently quoted in various technology and leadership-focused journals and is invited to share his thoughts on the future of technology.

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.

Scott Ready

Global Head of Accessibility & Inclusion
Verbit.ai

Scott Ready, has served the education industry for 20+ years and has worked for 35+ years in accessibility. Ready’s first language is American Sign Language, and he has been part of the deaf community through his parents, who were former teachers at the Missouri School for the Deaf. 

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.

MingKuan Liu

VP Data Science
Appen

MingKuan is the VP of Data Science at Appen. He has been working in automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and search relevance ranking areas for two decades. MingKuan has led multiple teams of researchers and engineers to bring cutting-edge algorithms into real-world AI & ML solutions running at a large scale in companies like eBay, Microsoft, and Garmin, etc. In the past few years, he is leading the Appen data science team to develop ML-
based automation solutions that combine both human and machine advantages to improve crowd workers' quality and efficiency with reduced bias.

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 Consultanti
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

Strategy Director
Vixen Labs

Susan Westwater advises some of the world’s best-known brands on how to capitalise on the incredible opportunity that 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 talks and held workshops and has authored, papers and eBooks focused on the role that Voice technology plays in marketing and business strategy. She has also been part of the key team leading the Voice Consumer Index research study since its inception in 2021. Susan co-authored the book Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences, which was a #1 Release on Amazon, and is co-author of Voice Marketing (coming in 2023 from Rowman and Littlefield). She is also an ambassador of Open Voice Network, an instructor for the Marketing AI Institute AI Academy, and a member of Women in Voice. She is recognised by her peers as a thought leader in innovation and Voice technology and in 2020 was recognised 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.

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.

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.

Alexi Schwartzkopff

Senior Innovation Manager
Appen

Alexi sits on the Solutions and Advanced Research leadership team and serves their global tech clients to support custom data collection projects for companies including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. She supports the creation of innovative data collecting tactics for consumer, business-to-business, and healthcare use cases. Alexi works to advance the agenda to reduce bias in AI by championing the first-of-its-kind voice assistant benchmark study that will support generating training data sets for underrepresented groups, alongside Appen's AI linguists and AI/ML experts.

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 Skill Developer
Wabi Sabi Software

AWS Community Hero, Leader of the Boston AWS MeetUp, 4x 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. His Premier League football skill has had over one million utterances processed.

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.

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.

Amelia Kelly

VP of Speech Technology
SoapBox Labs

Dr. Amelia Kelly is an artificial intelligence engineer and scientist specializing in automatic speech recognition of children’s voices. She is currently VP of Speech Technology at SoapBox Labs and holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Astronomy from NUI Galway, and an M. Phil and Ph. D in Linguistics and Speech Technology from Trinity College Dublin. Amelia has more than a decade of experience in speech signal processing, natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. In her career to date, Amelia has held various positions in industry and academia, including with IBM Watson, in Silicon Valley, and as a research fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. As well as various academic publications, she holds a patent in the area of cognitive computing and is a regular speaker at international technical conferences and industry events. She is a Fulbright TechImpact Scholar for 2020/2021. 

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.

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.

Robby Richardson

Senior Strategic Consultant
Cognigy

Robby Richardson is a senior strategic consultant at Cognigy, advising enterprise brands in North America on AI technology and business strategies. Well-versed in Conversational AI, Richardson helps executives formulate plans for transforming customer and employee experiences and contact center initiatives.

Tim Holve

CPaaS Channel Sales and ISV Partners, North America
Vonage

Tim Holve heads up the CPaaS API Channel and ISV ecosystem in North America having joined Vonage in September of 2020.  Previously, he built 5 Channel Sales ecosystems composed of GSI, SI, VAR, MSP, and Service Provider partners for startups and  startup divisions of Octel (UC), Cisco (Contact Center), Alcatel Lucent (UCaaS/CCaaS), IntelePeer (CPaaS), and Inference Solutions which is a conversational AI startup acquired by Five9.  Tim has a passion for new market changing technologies and a devout advocate of the “Customer Experience”.  Particularly, in how they can be deployed to generate business value.  He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from University of the Pacific and an MBA from Santa Clara University.  He enjoys golf, cycling, beach volleyball, music, and guitar.

Brad Stein

Global VP of Solutions Consulting
Poly.ai

Brad Stein is the Global VP of Solutions Consulting at PolyAI. He works closely with the world’s largest contact centers to deploy voice first automation in new and creative ways. Before joining PolyAI, Brad worked for Interactions, Genesys, and Interactive Intelligence.

Dr. Emre Sezgin

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Nationwide Children's Hospital and the Ohio State University College of Medicine

Dr. Emre Sezgin is a principal investigator at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He is focusing on digital health research and development for families, adolescents, and younger pediatric populations with chronic conditions. His particular interest is in remote patient monitoring and self-care with voice engagement and multimodal systems, patient-generated health data, and equitable and inclusive conversational AI.      He has been a co-investigator in a number of scientific research projects that are funded by federal agencies or national foundations, towards combining sensor technologies, mobile apps, voice assistants, conversational AI, and NLP methods to create a multimodal, intelligent, and integrated digital health ecosystem for patients and families. His work has been published in the leading medical informatics journals and highlighted in national and international media outlets. 

Dr. David Metcalf

Director, METIL
Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida

David Metcalf has more than 25 years of experience in the design and research of web-based and mobile technologies converging to enable learning and healthcare. Dr. Metcalf is Director of the Mixed Emerging Technology Integration Lab (METIL) at UCF's Institute for Simulation and Training. The team has built mHealth solutions, simulations, games, eLearning, mobile and enterprise IT systems for Google, J&J, VA, U.S. military and UCF's College of Medicine among others. Recent projects include Lake Nona’s Intelligent Home and transmedia, adaptive learning projects using mobile, AR and sims.

Dr. Metcalf encourages spinoffs from the lab as part of the innovation process and has launched Merging Traffic and several other for-profit and nonprofit ventures as examples. In addition to research and commercial investments, he supports social entrepreneurship in education and health. Dr. Metcalf continues to bridge the gap between corporate learning and simulation techniques and non-profit and social entrepreneurship. IoT, blockchain, cybersecurity, simulation, mobilization, mobile patient records and medical decision support systems, visualization systems, scalability models, secure mobile data communications, gaming, innovation management and operational excellence are current research topics outside his lab duties.

Dr. Metcalf frequently presents at industry and research events shaping business strategy and use of technology to improve learning, health and human performance. For more information see http://metil.org. He is the co-editor/author of Blockchain Enabled Applications (2021 & 2018), HIMSS Voice Technology in Healthcare (2020), HIMSS Blockchain in Healthcare (2019), Connected Health (2017), HIMSS mHealth Innovation (2014) and the HIMSS best-seller mHealth: From Smartphones to Smart Systems (2012).

Freddie Feldman

Director, Voice & Conversational Interfaces
Wolters Kluwer Health

Freddie leads a team of voice & conversational designers, architects, QA analysts, and researchers at Emmi, part of Wolters Kluwer Health-Clinical Effectiveness in Chicago. He has been working in healthcare technology for over twenty years at companies like Merck, Sachs Group, Sg2, Solucient, Image Stream Medical/Olympus, and Prefix Health. Freddie has worked on both the engineering and creative sides of various IVR and voice-assistant products and has a patent for a virtual call center system. Not only has he audio-engineered recordings for many IVRs & voice-assistants, but has also been the voice talent for several IVRs, audiobooks, and even a pinball machine.  

Freddie has owned an award-winning vocal-centric recording studio, VOCOMOTION Studios, for twenty-five years and has produced over 130 albums for a cappella groups in ten countries. Becoming a Voting Member of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (the Grammys) fifteen years ago was one of his proudest moments. In October 2018, Freddie gave a moving & informative TEDx talk to a sold-out crowd at TEDxVienna about improving the quality of life for people living with neurodegenerative diseases like PD, MS, MD, and ALS and his patented assistive throat microphone system. He holds both a BS in Computer Engineering and a BMus in Vocal Performance from Northwestern University.

Scot Westwater

Insights Director
Vixen Labs

Scot has been helping Fortune 500 clients remain on the cutting edge of emerging technology for most of his career. From the early days of the web to mobile app strategy, and now Voice and conversational experiences, Scot uses his wealth of knowledge to drive growth and enhance the customer experience of healthcare, retail and CPG organizations. He is also co-authoring his second book with his wife Susan titled “Voice Marketing” which is due out in Spring of 2023. 

Harry P. Pappas

Founder & CEO
Intelligent Health Association

Pappas is a successful, High Tech., Serial entrepreneur with a strong focus on the health technology sector. He is a strong believer in applying technology to transform the health and wellness community in today’s “Continuum of care”, from the hospital, to the primary care giver, and to the patient’s Smart Home. Pappas firmly believes that the world of digital health is being driven by the adoption of technology and therefore the need for Quality, ON-GOING education.   Harry is a global, thought leader and has been a tech geek since the age of 12.

He is a speaker at many Health and Wellness conferences and trade shows around the world.   He and his team are the producers of the award winning “Intelligent Health Pavilion ™ ” a technology centric, DIGITAL HOSPITAL, that you may have visited at many trade shows around the world, including at HIMSS over the last TEN years.  

Pappas is the Founder & CEO of the Intelligent Health Association, a global, Social Purpose, educational, technology centric organization dedicated to helping educate members of the Healthcare community on the adoption of new technologies, new software, smart drugs, apply digital therapeutics and APPS that can improve patient care, patient outcomes, and patient safety, while driving down the cost of Healthcare.

Hans van Dam

Founder
Conversation Design Institute

Hans van Dam is the founder of Conversation Design Institute, the world's leading training and certification institute for people working in conversational AI. Hans has trained more than 2,000 professionals in conversational AI and works with Fortune 500 companies to make their AI Assistants more human-centric, effective, and inclusive. He also leads CDI Foundation, a non-profit that develops design standards and provides scholarships within the industry. Hans is a frequent guest lecturer at universities worldwide. He is currently based in Amsterdam, where he lives with his family.

Nathan Liu

Head of Deployments
Poly.ai

Nathan is Head of Deployments at PolyAI, responsible for delivering enterprise voice assistants in industries from hospitality to financial services who now take millions of automated calls.

Ray Pikus

Developer 2
Hyland

Ray Pikus has been in the industry for about two years and has a good understanding of where things are going. He is speaking about the advantages of Google Home for personal communication and the strategy of large companies behind the interfaces that are gaining mass adoption. He is currently a software developer at a Microsoft shop document scanning software company.

Puru Amradkar

Chief Product Officer
AISera

Puru Amradkar brings over 20 years of extensive experience in building scalable, distributed cloud services. At Aisera, Puru leads the product and sales engineering teams with the belief that an alliance between products and technical sales leads to great product synergy. He has held leadership positions at Microsoft, where he was involved in the buildout of OneDrive, Outlook.com, and Microsoft Azure. Most recently, he led Product Management at ServiceNow for their ITOM business unit. Puru holds over 45 USPTO patents and has participated in multiple industry meetups as a guest speaker.

Gregory Whiteside

CEO and Co-Founder
HumanFirst

Software engineer, serial entrepreneur, co-founder & VP Engineering at PasswordBox (acquired by Intel), now solving NLU at scale with HumanFirst.ai.

Nitin Dhamelia

Global Digital & Search Marketing Manager
Barilla Group

Nitin Manhar Dhamelia is the global digital & search marketing manager at Barilla Group. Nitin has a 15-year track record of global B2B/B2C team management, governance, commercial experience, across Americas, EMEA, APAC.

Michael Kropidlowski

SVP of Marketing
Kore.ai

As SVP of Marketing at Kore.ai, Michael leads the global demand generation team charged with developing leading-edge marketing and communications programs. Michael also leads the global product marketing team to effectively promote the value Kore.ai solutions can bring to existing customer and new logo client organizations. He contributes directly to company strategy with a view to market trends and product strategy, focusing on enhanced customer and employee experiences enabled through omnichannel conversational AI engagement strategies.

Additionally, his team is responsible for competitive intelligence, product sales enablement and analyst relations to drive growth and recognition of Kore.ai solutions in the market. Michael has more than 30 years of experience in the customer service and contact center industries. Before joining Kore.ai in February 2022, Michael spent 23 years at Alvaria where he initially directed sales and technical channel partner training and transitioned to lead product marketing for the company’s customer experience and workforce engagement contact center portfolio.

Michael Collett

Conversation Designer
Australian Broadcast Company

Michael Collett joined the ABC as a journalist in 2008 and first became involved in conversation design in 2016 as one of the creators of the ABC News chatbot on Messenger. He switched to conversation design full-time in 2020 in order to create a voice app for ABC Emergency, among other CUI projects.

Gil Makleff

CEO and Co-Founder
Sembly.ai

Former CEO of UMT Consulting Group (now EY)
Americas Region Partner, EY Advisory
Previous Exits: 2006 Sale to Microsoft; 2015 sale to EY
Columbia University CS, NYU MBA

Stas Tushinskiy

CEO
Instreamatic

Stas Tushinskiy is the CEO of Instreamatic, based in Palo Alto, California. Prior to Instreamatic, Stas built a leading digital audio advertising sales house in Europe, working closely with Tier 1 brands like Porsche, Starbucks, and McDonalds, as well as global ad agencies including OMD and Mindshare. He's a contributing writer to several voice, marketing and advertising industry publications, including Radio & Internet News, MyCustomer, Podcast Business Journal, Mobile Marketing, and Marketing Magazine.

Johan Wouters

Director, Product Management
Cerence

Johan Wouters is Director of Product Management at Cerence, the market leader in voice AI for the automotive industry. Johan leads the strategy for Cerence Cloud and Cerence Drive Domains, powering voice solutions for navigation, media, communication, vehicle control, and infotainment as well as the recently announced solutions Cerence Browse, Cerence Connect, and Cerence Productivity. Johan leverages 25 years of experience in speech, having created a synthetic voice for the physicist Stephen Hawking as a postdoc at the Oregon Health & Science University.

Adam Emfield

Director, User Experience and the Cerence DRIVE Lab
Cerence

Adam Emfield is the Director User Experience and the Cerence Design & Research, Innovation, and In-Vehicle Experience (or DRIVE) Lab.  He is responsible for user experience design, research, and usability for products across the Cerence portfolio, and manages a cross-functional team that develops new ideas for in-vehicle experiences, and validates existing concepts on topics that range from looking at the problems users encounter today to predicting what changes will be necessary for the vehicles of the future.  Previously he studied human factors at both George Mason University and the University of Central Florida, and studied psychology and computer science at Idaho State University.