Dave is currently the Chief Evangelist for Alexa and Echo at Amazon. He has been a professional speaker, trainer, and evangelist for over a decade. He has taught full-day courses on many topics including voice design, natural language understanding, mobile, and the cloud. Dave has helped launch numerous technology platforms and devices while at both Microsoft and Amazon. He is an author for LinkedIn, hosts the AlexaDevChat podcast, alexadevchat.com, can be found online at thedavedev.com and Twitter as @thedavedev.
Noelle LaCharite is an evangelist at heart. She is passionate about Mindful Leadership, work-life harmony and empowering people to achieve their potential through emerging technology. She also specializes in helping brands develop skills for Amazon Alexa. She is the co-founder of a skill development company, Voice Skills Inc. She has spent many years as a trainer, architect, and evangelist for IBM, RedHat, EMC, Amazon and now Microsoft, whee she is now Director of Evangelism for DevCollective. She has taught thousands of people the value and importance of voice technology, Democratizing AI, and mindful leadership and has delivered keynotes, workshops and conferences around the world.
Paul works with builders to design and develop the next generation of customer experience - a voice based ambient computing user experience. Prior to Amazon, he was VP of Technology at Disney Interactive. Paul regularly speaks to creators around the world and is a toxophilite at heart. Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Twitch @PaulCutsinger.
Shwen is a recognized pioneer in digital health and social pharma, as well as a well-respected industry thought-leader who was named a Top 40 “Healthcare Transformer” by MM&M in 2015 and a PR Week and MM&M "Health Influencer 50" in 2017 & 2018. He sits on various advisory boards, including: Google (Healthcare), SXSW (Health), MM&M Healthcare Transformers, conversationHEALTH and the Digital Health Coalition.
Shwen brings over a decade of experience leading digital strategy and driving innovation in commercial, communications, and clinical organizations, both on the client-side and at leading creative agencies. He is often featured in industry publications, speaks regularly at industry events and chairs the Digital Innovation Day for the Digital Pharma Series (East, West and EU). In 2017, he spoke on Innovation in Healthcare at the prestigious Cannes Lions Health festival.
Shwen is also very involved in the health tech startup community and organizes startup bootcamps, runs startup pitch contests and plays an active role running healthcare hackathons around the world as part of the MIT Hacking Medicine team.
Sunayna Tuteja is the Global Head of Strategic Partnerships & Frontier Technologies at TD Ameritrade. With more than ten years of diverse global experience, she has a proven record for building new ventures from scratch and leading change that is critical in shaping the future of business.
At TD Ameritrade, Sunayna leads an entrepreneurial "tiger team" with a mission to build the next generation of products, experiences and business models to break down barriers in investing and empower more people for financial success, via the ecosystems they use every day. In this role, Sunayna leads strategy and commercialization for disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Voice and Virtual Reality, with the goal to solve problems, and create meaningful experiences for investors. Over the last 6 months, her team has delivered industry-first partnerships and products with startups and global technology companies including Apple, Amazon, Google and Tencent.
A life-long learner, Sunayna is working on her JD at Stanford Law with a focus on the impact and influence of disruptive technologies, and the future of jurisprudence. Partnering with the Stanford Innovation Lab, she works closely with the start-up and VC community helping to advance public and corporate innovation. Sunayna was recently recognized as one of Top 16 Women in Wealth Tech by Think Advisor Magazine. Outside of work and school, you can find Sunayna adventuring the skies in her Cessna. You can stay connected on Twitter @Sunayna.
I’ll admit it: I love talking with robots and teaching them to talk back. It’s been that way since I was a kid chatting to my toys with sadly no response. Since then, and for 20 years I’ve taught robots all over the World to carry on natural conversations for the Fortune 500 and their customers. Now at Google, I help internal groups and external partners develop and maintain best practices of conversation design for the Google Assistant.
Adrien Schmidt is an internationally recognized engineer, innovator, and speaker. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aristotle, an enterprise software company that delivers a personal voice analytics assistant that uses natural language processing to convert data analytics into meaningful conversation. Adrien is also a thought leader in the AI space whose work is featured in major publications such as Forbes, Inc, HuffPo, B2C and more. He is based in San Francisco, CA, USA.
Adva Levin is an Alexa champion and the founder of Pretzel Labs, an award winning voice-first studio that creates playful experiences for kids and families. Pretzel Labs' work includes Kids Court, an Alexa based judge that settles kids fights (Top 25 Alexa skill of 2018); Freeze Dancers, a dancing game for the most energized children; and Big Talk, a platform that encourages young English learners to enjoy conversational English.
Amy Stapleton is Founder of Tellables, a publisher of voice first conversational stories. Apart from designing voice apps, Stapleton is a writer and editor of content for the Tellables Amazon Alexa story experiences "Tricky Genie" and "My Box of Chocolates." Stapleton retired from a career at NASA to pursue her vision of transforming talking devices into a platform for engaging new story experiences.
Ann has focused her career on understanding how people use speech and natural language to communicate with each other and with technology. 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 designed multi-modal conversational mobile interfaces for patient self-care. At Nuance, she worked on multiple client projects, established VUI best practices based on user data, and taught others the ins and outs of voice design. She's been a VUI designer at Amazon Lab 126, and done R&D in language ID and emotion detection, retries and discourse structure. Currently Voice UI/UX Design Leader at Sound United, Ann continues her goal of creating user-centered VUI designs. She's co-author of the upcoming book Voice-First Development. Ann holds a PhD in Cognitive Science and Linguistics from UC San Diego.
Anne Weiler is CEO and co-founder of Wellpepper, a clinically-validated and award-winning platform for interactive treatment plans. Wellpepper is the winner of the Alexa Diabetes Challenge, and an early adopter of voice interfaces in healthcare. Anne previously held global product management roles at Microsoft, in new product development and emerging markets. She spent 3 years at Microsoft Russia leading the $300M Information Worker Business. Anne joined Microsoft in 2001 with the acquisition of Canadian web content management company, Ncompass Labs.
Archana Vemulapalli, General Manager, Global IS Offering Strategy, Management, and Development has end-to-end responsibility for IS offering design and co-creation with clients, offering management and development of market-led digital. Previously at IBM, Archana lead IBM's Networks Services and Project & Implementation Services globally, securely delivering agile, resilient and intelligent networks for public and private sector clients across the globe in support of their cognitive and cloud transformation. Prior to joining IBM in January 2018, Archana led next-generation technology initiatives at a variety of organizations from start-ups to major consulting firms to government, including serving as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Washington, DC. Archana is the recipient of several honors, including the Washington Business JournalÕs C-Suite Award, The Washingtonian Tech Titan Award, StateScoopÕs Golden Executive of the Year Award & Top Women in Tech Award, as well as DCÕs Top 50 Women in Tech Award.
Beth Ritter-Guth is the Associate Dean of Online Learning and Educational Technology at Northampton Community College. Her current work features the Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence programming in addition to ethical hacking, cyber law, gaming, gamification, and the digital humanities. She has earned multiple awards for the use of these technologies including the Teacher of the Future award by the National Association of Independent Schools, the Nobel Teacher of Distinction Award, the Campus Leadership Team Award by Campus Technology, and most recently, the Innovator of the Year by the League of Innovation and the Leadership & Innovation award from NJEdge. My work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Magazine, USA Today and America Online.
Bret Kinsella is CEO, Founder and Editor of Voicebot.ai, the leading research, news and analysis source for the voice and AI industries. His Voice Insider newsletter has a select audience of industry insiders and often breaks industry news weeks before it becomes public. Bret is a frequent speaker in the U.S. and Europe and also hosts the weekly Voicebot Podcast where he interviews the entrepreneurs, engineers and executives shaping the voice technology landscape. Bret is also a practitioner in voice app development where he has contributed to the strategy and design behind several popular voice apps on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. A past executive at Sapient and Accenture and an officer in several startups, Bret earned degrees from UCLA and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and can be found most weekends running in the mountains.
Cami works as a Senior Evangelist on Alexa for Amazon based in Seattle focused on Alexa Games. Since starting at Amazon in September 2017, Cami has spoken on behalf of Alexa at various conferences and workshops, including the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, reInvent, Consumer Electronics Show, and Game Developers Conference. Cami is proud to be an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. As a representative from the community she has spoken at over 40 different hackathons and events, most notably the GHC, the White House Tech Inclusion Summit, SXSWedu, ATECH Conference, and Google Women Engineers Conference. During her free time, Cami loves to play board games with friends, build mechanical keyboards, and quote the Office.
Cathy Pearl is Head of Conversation Design Outreach at Google, and the author of the O'Reilly book, "Designing Voice User Interfaces".Ê She's been designing and creating Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) for nearly 20 years and is passionate about helping everyone make the best conversational experiences possible.Ê Previously, Cathy was VP of User Experience at Sensely, whose virtual nurse avatar helps people stay healthy.Ê She has worked on everything from programming NASA helicopter pilot simulators to designing a conversational iPad app in which Esquire magazine's style columnist tells users what they should wear on a first date.Ê She has an MS in Computer Science from Indiana University and and BS in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego.
Christina Mallon is a digital marketer, inclusive designer and disability advocateÊat the forefront of an important movement working to combine inclusivity within technology and advertising. Christina's arms slowly became paralyzed at the start of her career. The transition to ÕdisabledÕ was challenging, but has never slowed her down. As a young digital marketing professional with a physical ÒdisabilityÓ she felt under-represented as a consumer. Rather than being discouraged, she recognized the opportunity to grow awareness and make a meaningful impact which drew her to her current positions as board member of Open Style Lab and Accessibility lead of POSSIBLE NY. In addition to these two positions, she consults brands like Macy's, IKEA, and The Wing on how to be more inclusive. ChristinaÕs work around inclusive design has received nation-wide attention and has been featured in Fast Company, Yahoo Style, NBC News, Vouge, BBC, and The New York Times.
"40 under 40 Healthcare Innovator by the Boston Business Journal and Medtech Boston; Cris is a seasoned entrepreneur/intrapreneur who is driven to improve human health through technology and innovation.
De Luca is currently the Global Head of Digital Innovation for Johnson & Johnson Innovation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He holds Chief Digital and Data responsibilities for translating Data Science/Hi-Tech external innovation opportunities throughout J&J’s Innovation Centers, JLABS incubators, and JJDC corp ventures across the Pharma, Consumer and Medical Device businesses.
With entrepreneurial DNA, Cris is most notably known for his role in the innovation economy since Co-Founding Ultra Light Startups, the oldest and largest startup-investor pitch accelerator in Boston and New York City with additional chapters in Silicon Valley and London. ULS accelerated 700+ bootstrapping startups with 26% having gone on to raise angel/venture funding, leading to several large-scale acquisitions by companies such as Apple, Trip Advisor and Singapore Telecom.
Cris is a Venture Fellow at FundRx and serves on the advisory boards of SXSW Health, AARP Health Innovation and VOICE Summit. He advises/mentors academic and research institutes, government agencies, corporations, entrepreneurs, and early stage companies."
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Dave Kemp is the Marketing & Business Development at Oaktree Products. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 2012 with a BA in Journalism and sold Business Intelligence to fortune 100 companies prior to joining Oaktree. Dave travels around the US to Audiology & Voice conferences, giving talks on future applications for Bluetooth hearing aid and hearable technology.
David is an entrepreneur at heart. For the last decade, David, with the help of his team, has grown Voices.com from the ground up to become the leader in the voice industry. As Chief Executive Officer, David is responsible for setting the vision, executing the growth strategy, creating a vibrant culture, and managing the company on a day-to-day basis. He is frequently published in outlets such as The Globe & Mail, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal.
"Doug Schumacher is an advertising creative director, ad tech entrepreneur and founder of voice and audio content studio Arrovox. He synthesizes his background as an advertising writer, brand strategist, social media content analyst and comedy podcast writer to guide clients to creative solutions firmly grounded in brand strategy.
Brands Doug has worked with include Starbucks, Disney, Frito-Lay, Intel, Apple, Nestle, The NFL, Nissan, Chevron, Capital One, Aramark, Sony Pictures, Mattel and Warner Bros. Ad agencies he’s worked with include DDB, TBWA/Chiat/Day, BBDO, Ogilvy, Saatchi, Y&R, FCB and RPA."
Galina Madjaroff is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a Clinical Associate Professor at the Erickson School for Aging Studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her duties include administrative and leadership responsibility for the undergraduate and graduate degree-granting programs, supervision of teaching assistants, coordination with all full and part-time faculty, course scheduling, scholarship programs and serving on the key committees at the University that help the Erickson School fulfill their role as a member of the academic and service community at UMBC. Dr. Madjaroff holds a Doctorate in Information Systems with a concentration in Human-Centered Computing. Her research focuses on improving the lives of older persons through the use of accessible technology as well as alleviating privacy and security concerns online for older persons. Her most recent work focused on alleviating caregiver and care recipient burden after the onset of cognitive impairment through the use of the Amazon Echo ÒAlexaÓ intelligent agent. She continues to focus her research on how Voice Userface Interface technologies such as the Amazon Echo can support older adults. Dr. Madjaroff 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. She has published on various topics including Person-Centered Technology and Quality of Life, Narratives of Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Their Caregivers and Supporting Caregivers and Care Recipients after the Onset of Cognitive Impairment with Home Based Technology, Amazon Alexa. Most recently Dr. Madjaroff was awarded a three-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation Grant to explore Negotiating Cyber Systems Access for Older Adults with Mild Neurocognitive Disorder.
Dustin Coates is Voice Search Go-to-Market Lead at Algolia. He has written Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant (Manning Publications), co-hosts VUX World, and writes about voice tech at Talking to Computers. He lives in Paris with his wife and smart home devices.
Ed Sewell is the CEO and Founder of Velocity AI. He is a thought leader in smart cities, smart buildings and autonomous, connected vehicle infrastructure. Velocity AI is a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for Artificial Intelligence startups. Voice is a natural interface to interact not just with the world around us, but also with physical assets and things, such as connected devices - including lights and autonomous vehicles. Velocity AI helps accelerate growth and innovation in voice technology investments. In addition to Velocity AI, Ed was the founder and architect of Virtual DNA. A global cyber security firm specializing embedded voice biometrics and machine learning.
Emily Binder is an entrepreneur, voice marketing strategist, and founder of Beetle Moment Marketing, a voice first marketing agency. Past: quarterback for dozens of successful marketing initiatives from startups to global brands. Present: helping businesses stay relevant and grow with forward-looking strategies focused on voice assistants, smart speakers, branded audio content, and social media. Emily speaks and writes about marketing, technology, and career. She hosts two shows about marketing and likes rollerblading, ergonomics, and hacking credit card points. Fun facts: 1) Emily attended high school where The Breakfast Club originated, 1.5 miles from the Home Alone house. 2) In 2010, Emily launched social media for RMS Titanic Inc., the salvor-in-possession of the wreck of Titanic. Listen to the 5-star Beetle Moment Marketing Flash Briefing: search for "Beetle Moment" on Alexa or Google. Marketing blog, podcast, clients & case studies, and more: beetlemoment.com Everywhere: @emilybinder and @beetlemoment
Eros Marcello is a Forbes-featured Conversational AI designer, writer and linguist specializing in developing cognitive personification for human-interfacing Artificial Intelligence, and a former SpaceX Hyperloop competitor.
Awarded the “She’s Mercedes” businesswoman award by Mercedes Benz among women such as Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook.
Flavilla Fongang is an award-winning businesswoman, international speaker, MD, and creative brand strategist. She was also a guest marketing and brand strategy lecturer at Goldsmiths University, she mentors at London Metropolitan University and was named the most influential businesswoman by LinkedIn. Her creative branding and marketing agency has already received multiple awards. Her agency works predominantly with tech, finance, luxury and FMCG companies.
On top of being a creative brand strategist, she is also a colourology expert and multi-entrepreneur. She was born & raised in Paris and moved to London in 2002 despite being unable to speak English. Within her first year in London, she obtained a BA in Economics & Law, a BA in Marketing & Communications and MA in International Business with distinction. Her determination extends to helping her clients achieve their goals and they appreciate her positive attitude and fun personality. As a result, her clients have achieved outstanding outcomes for their business. She believes and has seen businesses achieve more when they develop brands with authentic human purpose.
She has developed her creativity and experience working in different business environments: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, North/South America, and Europe. Traveling and working internationally helped her stay ahead of trends, and understand the cultural diversity of each client market and adapt to it. She has over 15 years of client management, marketing, branding, team management and leadership experience working with micro to large companies.
Halim is a high tech innovator who spearheaded world-class data science projects at game changing techs like eBay and Teradata. Formally educated in Machine Learning, his professional expertise span Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Big Data. Halim has a proven track record of applying state of the art data science techniques across industry verticals such as eCommerce, web & mobile services, airline, BioPharma, and the medical technology industry. He currently leads the AI department at Cognoa, a data driven behavioral healthcare startup in Palo Alto.
Heidi Culbertson is the Founder and CEO of Marvee, a Voice-First Strategy & Design studio specializing in voice experiences for our aging population. The mission is simple, to create context-aware voice experiences to make life better for older adults, families, and those who surround them throughout the aging journey.
While studying Industrial Design + Wearable Technology at OCAD University In Toronto, I realized that things weren't just going to be just things for much longer.
Now, I’m a Senior Designer and Researcher: creating compelling, contextual experiences for ambitious companies, and researching + establishing best practices within the emerging fields of voice design and augmented reality. I do my best work in the discovery and definition phases on the design process: researching, developing strategies, ideating, and designing and testing interactions. When I’m not designing with my team, I’m writing about research processes and my thoughts on the future, reviewing skincare products and training as an amateur powerlifter.
James is the CEO and Co-Founder of Vixen Labs, a Voice first consultancy and Founder of the UK’s leading Voice & AI community Voice2.
James is an innovation and Marketing consultant with over 10 years experience specialising in Voice, Conversational AI Technologies and emerging platforms such as Immersive AR/VR, 5G and Blockchain.
Previously as Head of The LEGO Group’s Emerging Platforms & Partnerships team as part of the Digital Consumer Engagement division, James Poulter is pursuing new technologies, platforms and partners to build digital consumer engagement with LEGO customers, shoppers and consumers on a global basis.
James 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 it’s first year.
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.
Outside of work James is an advisor to the Church of England’s digital board as well as well as a number of other charities, entrepreneurs and startups.
James is also the host of the show “Signal” for Christians In Media which explores on a monthly basis the intersection between faith, media and technology.
James is a father to Hazel and Willow and husband to Holly and lives in Greenwich in South-East London. He can be found on all good social media as @jamespoulter
James Vlahos is the author of TALK TO ME: How Voice Computing Will Change the Way that We Live, Work, and Think (Houghton Mifflin, March 26, 2019). Covering the business, technological, cultural ramifications of the voice revolution, the book has been described by readers such as Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson as "brilliant and essential." Vlahos is also the creator the Dadbot, an conversation-making program that shares the personality and life story of his late father, and of an Alexa skill, The Voice Computing Book. Vlahos contributes to the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Popular Science, The Atlantic, and GQ.
"I am a visionary entrepreneurial Data Scientist, recognized as a technical evangelist, innovator, and communicator in cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, enterprise data sciences, and machine learning. I help companies realize new capabilities and potential by teaching others how effective use of yesterday’s data can shape today’s human behavior to produce desired results tomorrow.
Company leaders, investors, and stakeholders reach out to me regarding recent work in developing practical methods for unifying AI capabilities and big data infrastructure to ‘bend the business curve’ in solving real problems facing today's businesses; and, I am often asked to speak at company and industry events and write pieces that translate complex modeling into clear business understanding."
"Jess is CEO & Cofounder of Opearlo, a YC backed startup producing some of the most popular voice apps on Amazon Alexa, inc. Find My Phone, Guess My Name, and the kid favourite Panda Rescue. An Amazon Alexa Champion and nominee for the Alexa Award ""Executive of the Year,"" Jess is an active member of the voice community who regularly speaks at conferences/meet-ups about her direct experience working in voice, covering topics such as lessons learnt and voice design.
Jess is a regular speaker at conferences, covering voice topics such as lessons learned, voice design, and monetisation on Alexa. She is also a voice design tutor and mentor for CareerFoundry’s Voice Design course."
Jessica Dene Earley-Cha is a Developer Advocate for Google Assistant. She loves to connect with developers and explore VUI (voice user interface) to add another dimension to how user interact with technology. Jessica is part of the leadership team for WomenInVoice@. You’ll find her either spending time with her dog, collecting strawberry knick knack or biking around town.
Currently, Jim is the founding CEO of NeuroLex Labs, a company that is making voice computing accessible to everyone. He is also the author of Introduction to Voice Computing in Python, a textbook that outlines a new definition for voice computing with 200+ starter scripts on GitHub to train the next-generation of voice computing experts. Previously, Jim was a founding Partner of NeuroLaunch and CyberLaunch which invested in and grew over 22 companies in the neuroscience, cybersecurity, and machine learning verticals. He holds BS in biomedical engineering from Georgia Tech.
Joanne Lin is a Principal at Newark Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund that invests in Seed/Series A stage B2B technology companies. As Principal, Joanne leads the fund's direct investment strategy focusing on the sourcing and diligence of potential deals and on-going portfolio management.
Prior to joining Newark Venture Partners, Joanne was an education investor with University Ventures focusing on companies transforming the higher education space. She was co-founder of a Newark-based social enterprise aimed at expanding community access to digital manufacturing technology. Joanne also has 10 years of finance experience at JPMorgan, and is a TeachForAmerica alumna. Joanne has a M. Ed from Hunter College and a BA in Economics from Barnard
Joel is an innovative and creative scientist who leverages experience in neurobiology, physics, instrumentation and statistics to generate and analyze large data sets. Currently, he is a Sr Manager at Biogen in the Quantitative Medicine and Clinical Technologies group. Joel started his career at Vanderbilt University where he obtained a PhD in the center for molecular neuroscience under Dr. Louis J DeFelice studying neurotransmitter transporter. After graduate school, Joel was hired as the managing director of imaging at the Stowers Institute for medical research. He was responsible for the development of light microscopy-based methodologies and image analysis. Joel left this position to purse work with Dr. Michael Ehlers at Duke University studying key molecular components for synaptic plasticity. He served as a technology lab lead within the Neuroscience Research Unit at Pfizer to build a strong technology base for advanced experimentation and informatics support. Joel served as a translator between the biologists, statisticians, physicists, and computer infrastructure professionals. Throughout his career, Joel has done pioneering work in analytics and informatics to help provide a quantitative structure to extract meaningful data from imaging sources. He leveraged these skills in leadership positions in small biotechnology startup Biomedical Data Analytics. He has the skills and knowledge base to assemble multifaceted teams to develop and build novel technologies. CEO/Co-founder of Biomedical Data Analytics (BDA) focused on software-as-a-service (SaaS) for contract research. BDA provides advanced analytical tools on a proprietary cloud based platform to extract additional information from clinical and pre-clinical data. He has a unique perspective as a laboratory scientist, with extensive computational experience. The synergy of these efforts resulted in delivering novel AI methods to monitor videos of autistic patients to augment current clinical efforts for underserved rural populations. In addition to his efforts at BDA, Joel is the lead instructor for Northeastern University’s Level Data Analytics program and Instructor in the Master of Professional Studies in Analytics programs. He teaches the analytics core sections, predictive analytics, programming, machine learning and big data for students pursuing a career in data science. These efforts have lead Joel to his current work at Biogen in the Quantitative Medicine and Clinical Technologies group. The QMCT group is devoted to using quantitative approaches to develop more robust outcomes in clinical trials with an overarching goal to provide higher success rates.
As NPRÕs Vice President for New Platform Partnerships, Joel Sucherman guides strategy and leads the teams that build NPRÕs presence on voice assistants and other emerging platforms. Under SuchermanÕs leadership, NPR has become a preeminent brand on smart speakers, developing skills and actions on Alexa and Google Assistant platforms used by millions of people each month. SuchermanÕs teams were also responsible for NPR One, an IOS and Android app that uses a combination of algorithms and human curation to provide a personalized radio news/podcast experience. Prior to working in public radio, Sucherman was instrumental in the digital transformation of USA TODAY, re-imagining storytelling for the ÒNationÕs NewspaperÓ on various platforms.
Juergen leads the Speech & Digital Assistants team at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America (MBRDNA) in Sunnyvale, CA, which builds software that lets Mercedes-Benz customers talk to their cars – inside of the car, through the built-in #HeyMercedes voice assistant, and outside the car through integrations with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
This team has partnered with SoundHound on evolving the decades-old voice control of Mercedes-Benz cars into a full-fledged digital assistant, that can answer many questions about and also beyond the vehicle. The #HeyMercedes voice assistant premiered with the new Mercedes-Benz User Experience (MBUX) in the A-Class.
Juergen joined MBRDNA in 2018, after previously leading the Platform & APIs Product Management team for smart speaker manufacturer Sonos. After getting his German University Diploma in Math and CS many moons ago, Juergen spent 15 years at Enterprise Software vendor SAP, working on many projects such CRM, in-memory databases, developer ecosystems and cultural transformation. He also did AI when AI wasn’t cool.
Katherine Watier Ong, CEO of WO Strategies, is an online marketing consultant, coach, and public speaker. She has over 20 years of experience providing digital marketing strategies for brands including Cancer.gov, HealthIT.gov, NOAA Fisheries, New York Health Benefits Exchange (NYStateofHealth.gov), American College of Cardiology, Cleveland Clinic, Environmental Working Group, and RollCall.com. She previously ran the digital marketing and analytics team for Ketchum PR globally.
She has spoken about SEO and digital marketing at the Voice Summit, SES Chicago, Online Marketing Summit, EXl Pharma Conference, as well as DC AMA and PRSA events. She has been featured in Humans of Analytics and on Forbes’ Outstanding Women in Analytics list.
She earned both an MA from Georgetown University in Tech Marketing and Business (where she conducted the first consumer adoption study of wearable computers), and a BA in Social Psychology from Hampshire College.
Kourtney Bitterly is Lead for The New York Times’ R&D group. Her role is to understand how emerging technology and consumer behavior will impact the way media is consumed and created, and articulate future-focused strategies in response. Her current area of exploration is how voice-assistant platforms will shape content accessibility and content. Kourtney comes to The Times from Matter, a venture capital firm and startup accelerator focused on investing in media startups. At Matter, Kourtney was Director of Partnerships and led the partner accelerator program. Prior to that, she directed Kickstarter’s effort to reshape the way it partners with creators, headed up strategic partnerships at theSkimm, and led business development at IDEO New York. She began her career working as a researcher for television news. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish Literature from the University of Notre Dame.
Maarten Lens-FitzGerald instigates movements that shape the future as a keynote speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur. His latest movement and new medium is Voice. He is Global Head of Voice at the European digital product agency Nodes and he founded the event series Open Voice, bi-monthly and on average 180 attendees. Also, he started the weekly Open Voice newsletter with the current Voice news as well as the Voice Cast, a podcast show with Business News Radio. All in English and for the European market. Previously Maarten founded and exited successfully the largest Augmented Reality platform Layar and the future of work platform Teamily.
Overall Voice is Maartens 5th new medium, after AR, mobile, email, and web. Throughout his career, he keynoted at many events from World Economic Forum, TED to Mobile World Congres. He advises c-level and boards of local and international top companies on how to frame use the new opportunities of the new media. This summer he will publish his first book 'Voice'.
Mark Mezrich is the Vice President, Voice Products for Viacom Media Networks, building voice-first experiences across platform for Viacom’s brands such as Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, and Comedy Central. He and his team have created some of the most popular activations on voice platforms today, from The SpongeBob Challenge to Comedy Central Stand-Up. Previously, Mark oversaw music products for MTV, VH1, and CMT.
"Mark Webster is Director of Product at Adobe, focusing on voice integration for Adobe XD. He is also responsible for driving product strategy for emerging technologies within XD. Mark joined Adobe through the acquisition of the company he founded, Sayspring, which offers a design and prototyping platform for voice interfaces.
Prior to Sayspring, Mark was Director of Product for Groupon, focusing on entertainment and events. He landed at Groupon after SideTour, an e-commerce marketplace for local activities he co-founded, was acquired by Groupon in September 2013. Mark started his career with a five-year stretch at the National Basketball Association, where he worked in Creative Services.
Mark shares his thoughts on voice and the future of design on Twitter or Medium."
Marli Mesibov is the VP of Content Strategy at the digital UX agency Mad*Pow. Her work spans strategy and experiences across industries, with a particular interest in healthcare, finance, and education. She is a frequent conference speaker, a former editor of the UX publication UX Booth, and was voted one of MindTouchÕs Top 25 Content Strategist Influencers in 2016. Marli can also be found on Twitter, where she shares thoughts on UX Design, content strategy, and Muppets. You can learn more about her and her work at http://marli.us
Michael L. Atkinson is a serial restaurant technology investor, entrepreneur and strategic advisor to brands, investors, investment banks and technology innovators. As a former restaurant operator and CFO, Michael has a unique perspective on emerging technologies transforming the restaurant industry. Michael founded and is Chairman of FohBoh.com and inFOH.com and CEO of Orderscape.com, a leading-edge voice search and conversational commerce software platform to voice-enable full-menu food ordering using voice assistants and mobile voice platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant/Home.
Michael@orderscape.com
@michaelatkinson"
Navya is a Product Manager of Voice Platforms at Gannett – USA TODAY NETWORKS and is instrumental in launching Voice applications for 100+ Gannett’s national and local news properties. Previously, Navya was a Product Manager at Witlingo and has overseen the deployment of several of the enterprise skills, including the Motley Fool, Meetup, Fish & Richardson, and Cooley LLP. Navya holds a Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Nekpen Osuan, PMP is a Manager at Deloitte Consulting where she leads the consulting expansion for Analytics and Cognitive Insights. She is also the CEO & Co-Founder of @WomenWerk, a womenÕs empowerment non-profit reaching 5500 women and girls annually in New York City. Nekpen enjoys building diversity and inclusion in tech and social impact. She was recently named a BlogHer 2018 Voice of the Year, the 2017 Baylor University Young Alumna of the Year, a 2018 92Y Woman in Power Fellow, a 2018 Walkers Legacy Women in Leadership Honoree, and a 2017 Council of Urban Professionals Fellow. Nekpen serves on the DNCÕs Young Professionals Committee and Women's Leadership Forum, and is a volunteer on professional boards for The Lower Eastside Girls Club, The New Leaders Council, and the famed Apollo Theatre.
Dr. Nicol Turner Lee (she, her) is a fellow in the programÕs Center for Technology Innovation and a contributor to TechTank. She comes to Brookings from the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council (MMTC), a national non-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting and preserving equal opportunity and civil rights in the mass media, telecommunications, and broadband industries, where she served as vice president and chief research and policy officer. At the Center for Technology Innovation, Dr. Turner Lee researches public policy designed to enable equitable access to technology across the U.S. and to harness its power to create change in communities across the world. Dr. Turner-LeeÕs research also explores global and domestic broadband deployment, regulatory, and internet governance issues. She is also an expert on the intersection of race, wealth, and technology within the context of civic engagement, criminal justice, and economic development. Dr. Turner Lee graduated from Colgate University magna cum laude and has a M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University.
Paul Jackson is a Senior UX Designer in the Voice + AI team at the BBC. He has been designing, prototyping and building digital products for over 15 years, counting Disney, Honda and Nintendo amongst his previous clients.
In 2018 Paul lead the design of the BBC Kids Skill – a collection of interactive games, stories and songs aimed at a preschool audience – which was released on Amazon Echo.
Polina is a strategist, designer, and thought leader focused on voice-first products, Machine Learning and Product Delivery craftsmanship. She is interested in creating novel products and meaningful experiences that help businesses grow and simultaneously inspire, engage and empower users. As co-founder of Voice Tech TO Polina is dedicated to growing and supporting the community of practitioners, who are interested in voice and helps develop plays and tactics to ensure successful voice-first product delivery.
Rachel Batish is VP of Product at Audioburst where she leads where she leads product roadmap and strategy thinking, connecting unique audio and content listening experiences to consumers on cars, 3-party-speaker and headphones devices and apps. Prior to Audioburst, Batish was founder of Conversation.one, a build-once-deploy anywhere platform for voice and chat conversational applications, focusing on non-developers and complex use cases. She held a similar role at Zuznow. Rachel is also the author of Voicebot and Chatbot Design and has founded and participated in a number or organizations to promote networking and education in the AI and voice space including TechStars and NYC Enterprise and Mobility Meetup. Batish received her BA in Political Science and International Relations from Technische Universitat Dermstadt and MA in European Studies from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She resides in Silicon Valley.
Robert has been working in the connected car area since 2014 and is a Software Engineer at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America based in Sunnyvale, CA. He used to be a Scrum Product Owner for web frontend development before focusing on the connection of IoT and mobility use cases. On this quest, he is part of the engineering team who integrates voice assistants with connected car interfaces to enhance vehicle interaction. He is passionate about meaningful speech applications and finding the ÒeverydayÓ use cases in the mobility sector.
Ryan Bales is the Director of Analytics Engineering at DialogTech. HeÕs 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.
Shanthan Kesharaju is the founder of Sermo Labs and a Director of Product Management at Fidelity Investments. Sermo Labs was founded in 2018 with a primary mission to make education fun and engaging for kids through voice experiences like Alexa. Some of the flagship skills from Sermo Labs thus far have been Alexa Skills like ’1-2-3 Math’, ‘World Mathematics League’ and ‘Hungry Birds’. 1-2-3 Math and World Mathematics League skills, besides featured and finding a recurring spot on ‘Amazon’s Top Trending’ skills list, have also been recognized as ‘“Amazon’s Best Alexa Skills of 2018”. Shanthan Kesharaju has won multiple Amazon Alexa Hackathons and continues to explore new and innovative ideas in the voice arena. Shanthan believes that learning should be an ‘all-inclusive universal process’ and is passionate about championing for ‘Technology for a Cause’ where he is also focusing on enabling kids with special needs learn with Alexa using Computer Vision. At Fidelity Investments as the Director of Product Management, Shanthan is leading the Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning product portfolios. Shanthan has an MBA from Duke Fuqua School of Business, Masters in Information Systems from Oklahoma State University and is currently pursuing MS in Analytics from Georgia Tech.
Sina Kahen hails from the medical devices and voice technology industries. He is currently the Head of Strategy and Design at VAICE, a pro-bono consulting group that help brands discover the benefits of voice and conversational AI, from strategy to experience. He identifies the challenges presented after the recent wave of voice technology adoption, and aims to solve them with principles from design-thinking, biomimicry, and philosophy. He graduated as a Biomedical Scientist, and has an MBA from Imperial College Business School.
Stuart Crane is a software entrepreneur of 30+ years. Stuart co-founded a software company, CPR+, in 1993 and grew it successfully for 20 years to become the leading provider of enterprise software to the Specialty Pharmacy industry. After CPR+ was acquired in 2013, Stuart founded Voice Metrics, a company building software platforms for businesses to connect data to Voice Assistants, supporting Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. Voice MetricsÕ most recent platform is SurveyLine Ð Surveys By Voice, allowing any company or individual to create surveys to be taken BY VOICE. Stuart can be reached at: stuart@stuartcrane.com
Dr. Teri Fisher is a Physician and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is an experienced keynote speaker, educator, briefcaster, and podcaster, who loves sharing his excitement and passion for artificial intelligence and voice-first technology. One of his particular interests is the intersection of voice technology, marketing, and flash briefings. He is the founder of Alexa in Canada, the leading Amazon Alexa resource for Canadians; and Briefcast.FM, the premier flash briefing network. He is the host of the weekly “Alexa in Canada” Podcast and the daily "Voice in Canada" Flash Briefing, the #1 rated Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing and News Skill in Canada. He is also the creator of the most comprehensive (and entirely FREE!) flash briefing course on the market: Flash Briefing Formula. Dr. Fisher also has a strong passion for education, healthcare, and technology. He is the founder and host of “Voice First Health”, the industry-leading blog and podcast that highlights the intersection of voice technology and healthcare. The mission of Voice First Health is to develop a community to advance voice technology and health innovation, and together revolutionize the healthcare experience for patients and providers. Dr. Fisher has been a featured guest on technology and marketing podcasts, and he is a frequently sought-after speaker about marketing and voice, in addition to the future of medicine in the context of voice. Dr. Fisher holds Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Education, Master of Science, and Medical Doctorate degrees. You can listen to his top-rated flash briefings and podcasts at: https://VoiceInCanada.cahttps://AlexaInCanada.cahttps://VoiceFirstHealth.com
You can access his complete flash briefing course at: http://FlashBriefingFormula.com
Connect with Dr. Fisher on Twitter @DrTeriFisher
Tom is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Newark Venture Partners (NVP), a $50M venture fund and accelerator based in downtown Newark, NJ. NVP is backed by Amazon, Prudential and a number of other notable investors, entrepreneurs and politicians. In addition to driving financial returns, NVP mission is to attract and grow great tech start-ups in Newark, build the local tech/business ecosystem and drive economic benefits to the city in the form of jobs, residents, taxes and foot traffic. www.Newark.vc Tom also manages RosePaul Investments, his family office, and its proprietary fund, RosePaul Ventures that invests in tech start-ups and VC/PE funds. RosePaul's tech start-up portfolio is focused on software enabled business. www.rosepaul.com He is an active early stage investor and adviser to start-ups, venture capital, private equity and growth-stage companies. Tom is member of New York Angels, an early stage investment group. He serves as a board member and adviser to a number of early stage ventures. Prior to this Tom was a Partner at the management consulting firm Baldwin Bell Green (BBG) where he focused on Financial Services, Technology and Private Equity clients. His practice area was advising senior management in the areas of Strategy, Operations and IT. Prior to joining Baldwin Bell Green in 2008, Tom worked independently for 7 years as an adviser to private equity/venture capital firms and on two occasions joined the management team of a portfolio company. Prior to 2000, he spent 7 years as a management consultant at Mitchell Madison Group where he was a Partner. Prior to business school, Tom worked at Morgan Stanley in technology development and investment banking. Tom holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Clark University and an MBA from Dartmouth. He lives in NYC with his wife and two children.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan is Co-Founder, CEO & CTO of Pindrop. He’s held various engineering and research roles with Google, Siemens, IBM Research and Intel.
Vijay holds patents in VoIP security and scalability and he frequently speaks on phone fraud threats at technical conferences, including RSA, Black Hat, FS-ISAC, CCS and
including RSA, Black Hat, FS-ISAC, CCS and ICDCS. Vijay earned a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. His PhD thesis was on telecommunications security.
As Chief Marketing Officer, 1-800-Flowers.com, Amit is responsible for leading a multi-channel marketing strategy for the brand across online, digital and social channels. Additionally, he manages innovation partnerships and provides strategic direction for the growth and development of mobile and social commerce across the company’s entire portfolio of brands. Amit has a proven track record for leading digital and performance marketing, while rapidly scaling user acquisition and revenue streams. He joined 1-800-Flowers.com in September 2011 to manage online, mobile and social marketing initiatives. Over the next several years, he was promoted to roles of increasing responsibility and was named Chief Marketing Officer in March 2017. Prior to joining the company, Amit held strategy and business development roles at FTD, Visiting Nurse Service of New York and McKinsey & Company. Under Amit’s leadership, the company continues to be at the forefront of implementing new and emerging technologies. To nurture and grow the entrepreneurial spirit across the company’s portfolio of brands, Amit oversees the company’s Digital Leadership Program, an incubator for young talent and catalyst for driving innovation throughout the organization. Amit is a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee for the Mobile Marketing Association. He has a master’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Bowdoin College.
Angela Stengel is the Head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Content Ideas Lab, a team responsible for exploring fresh ideas that connect with new audiences, whatever the format or platform.
Angela led a team to launch ABC's first audio briefings for voice assistants and has worked closely with the ABC R&D team on exploring new and experimental ways for journalists to tell stories on emerging voice platforms.
As Product Development Lead for ABC Radio, Angela bridged the gap between technical and editorial, bringing together designers, engineers and broadcasters.
Applying human-centred design techniques to content projects has been part of Angela's approach for some years, a highlight being using "Jobs To Be Done" to set up ABC's first digital only podcast commissioning, a project which created three top rating podcasts including Science Vs.
Arte Merritt is the co-founder and CEO of Dashbot – the leading chat bot analytics platform, which has processed over 30 billion messages. Previously, he founded the mobile analytics platform, Motally, which he led to a successful exit via sale to Nokia. Arte has 18 years experience in the mobile space and over 20 in the analytics space, working with companies like Yahoo Mobile, Turner Broadcasting, and a wide variety of startups. In addition, he helped launch two accelerator programs, Turner’s Media Camp and Mobile Monday’s Momentum, and is a mentor in Orange Fab. Arte is an MIT alum.
Brandon is the Founder of SKILLED, an emerging technology creative agency, headquartered in NYC. Obsessed with technology throughout his life, Brandon founded SKILLED with the mission to bend emerging technologies creatively. SKILLED develops best in class VOICE experiences for Fortune 500 brands including PepsiCo and Starbucks. SKILLED treats conversational interfaces as a true omni-channel platform, ready to be leveraged by brands in order to drive engagement, conversion, and transactions.
Brian Roemmele is the consummate Renaissance man. He is a scientist, researcher, analyst, connector, thinker and doer on a mission to get to the root of a remarkable variety of issues. Today, he has his sights set on the evolution of voice technology and works directly with startup and legacy companys to build sustainable voice first plans. Over the long, winding arc of his career, Brian has built and run payments and tech businesses; worked in media, including the promotion of top musicians; and explored a variety of other subjects. He has written over 400 articles published across fora like Forbes, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Slate, Business Insider, Daily Mail, Inc, Gizmodo, Medium, Quora (An exclusive top writer for: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013) and on Twitter. A frequent guest on podcasts, Brian has appeared at events such as Money 20/20, ETA Transact and many private events as a speaker on the future of voice commerce.
Darlene Gillard Jones
Director Community, Founding Team, digitalundivided
Darlene Gillard Jones is part of the Founding team and Director, Community for digitalundivided, a social enterprise that fosters economic growth through the empowerment of Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs using innovation as a tool where she oversees all Community Partnerships, events and is part of the leadership team focused on expansion. The cornerstone of digitalundivided’s work is the BIG Incubator program (BIG) for tech enabled startups led by Black and Latinx women that provides a structured curriculum focused on developing sustainable businesses and direct access to funding.
Darlene has spent the past 20 years as the idea-to-execution force behind some of the most well-known brands and publications in business, media, and technology.
Prior to digitalundivided, Darlene held senior leadership positions at several national media outlets for women including W, Essence, and Elle Magazines and spearheaded projects for Time Inc, eBay, Disney, and the International Downtown Association. Darlene is often tapped for public speaking engagements including Georgia Tech, Grace Hopper, and SXSW.
Eddie O’Leary is the Founder and President of COLAB, a digital strategy, design, and development agency located in Richmond, Virginia. He founded COLAB in 2008 to focus on great customer service and solving real-world business problems. For the past eleven years, Eddie has steadily grown COLAB both in size and reputation. In 2014, Eddie was selected to participate in Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses Program at Babson College, where he earned a Certificate in Entrepreneurship. COLAB was recognized as one of Richmond's top 25 fastest growing businesses in 2013 and 2014, and has received numerous design awards from AIGA and the Richmond Ad Club. In 2018, COLAB was named among INC Magazine’s 5,000 fastest growing private companies.
Fiona Kate is a producer on the BBC Voice + AI team in London.
In previous roles Fiona has produced radio programmes, visual documentaries, social and digital content, podcasts and events - working as a journalist for the UK number 1 youth broadcast station, BBC Radio 1.
She's an active member of the Women in Voice London leadership team where she helps to organise offline events in the capital, which encourage a better-represented workforce in the industry.
Laurence Minsky is renowned in professional and academic circles for his strategic and creative leadership and broad-reaching industry expertise which includes brand development, advertising, brand activation, content marketing, new product development, direct response marketing, local store marketing, channel communications, as well as online, mobile, and social marketing. He is also known for developing effective award-winning cross-channel solutions that boost marketing ROI.
He currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Communication in the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago and as a strategic and creative marketing consultant for agencies, corporations, and nonprofits across the globe.
Laurence is also the co-author of The Activation Imperative: How to Build Brands and Business by Inspiring Action (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Audio Branding: Using Sound to Build Your Brand (Kogan Page 2017), executive editor of The Get A Job Workshop: How to Find Your Way to a Creative Career in Advertising, Branding, Collateral, Digital, Experiential & More (Copy Workshop, 2013), the author of How to Succeed in Advertising When All You Have Is Talent Second Edition (Copy Workshop 2007) and Advertising Under One Hour (Under One Hour LLC 2-18) and a contributor to Advertising and the Business of Brands Media Revolution Edition (Copy Workshop 2009). As an industry thought-leader, he has been published by the Harvard Business Review, European Business Review, MarketingProfs, and others, and has been quoted in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Exame (Brazil’s largest business and economics magazine), Shopify’s blog, Crain’s Chicago Business, and many more.
His agency experience includes a tenure at Frankel (now Arc Worldwide) and engagements with more than 25 other agencies as a consultant. And, he has created strategic and communications solutions for many blue-chip clients, including AARP, Laila Ali, Amazon, Ambius, AON, Bay Valley Foods (various brands), Beltone, Black & Decker Spacemaker, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola Products, Connie’s Pizza, DTE Energy, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fleetwood Homes, Frito-Lay, George Foreman Products, Kraft Foods, The Lakeside Collection, Lamin-Art, Mayo Medical Laboratories (Mayo Clinic), McDonald’s, MetLife, Midtown Athletic Clubs, Motorola, PetSmart, Spacelabs Healthcare, Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), True Value, Unilever, United Airlines, United States Postal Service, Westinghouse, Vita Foods, and many more.
An award-winning creative with more than 125 industry accolades to date, he has served on the juries of many leading industry award shows, including Lürzer’s International Archive 200 Best Digital Artists Worldwide 2015/2016, The One Club Young Ones Competition, and the Design of the Times, and he is a long-standing member of the One Club for Art and Copy, the Authors Guild, and the American Academy of Advertising.
Lisa Falkson is currently Senior VUI Designer at Amazon. She is the editor and author of “Ubiquitous Voice: Essays from the Field” and has over 15 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 BS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Speech and Auditory Perception Laboratory at UCLA.
Nathan Treloar has served in executive leadership roles in several successful high growth software companies including Orbita where he’s led efforts to launch the company’s leading conversational AI technologies and services for healthcare organizations. Entities like Amgen, Mayo Clinic, and Deloitte use Orbita to create and deliver HIPAA-compliant voice- and chatbot-powered virtual assistants designed to increase operational efficiencies and improve consumer, patient, and member experiences. Previously, Nathan held key executive positions at FAST Search, Microsoft, RAMP, and, Ektron. He is a respected expert and speaker on voice and chatbot technologies, IOT, search, text and data mining, content management, and knowledge management. He has advised hundreds of the world’s largest companies and government agencies on these applications.
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ntreloar/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ntreloar?lang=en
@ntreloar
Shane Mac is the Chief Automation Officer at Conversocial, where he is responsible for leading adaptive automation innovation for automated consumer messaging experiences. Previously, Shane was the co-founder and CEO of Assist, the leading enterprise chatbot platform for messaging and voice, which was acquired by Conversocial early 2019. In that role, he developed technology that powered some of the world’s largest brands like 1-800-Flowers.com, Sephora, T-Mobile, Hyatt, Fandango, and the NBA; and launched the first-ever commerce experiences on Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant.
Hello! I’m a freelance creative technologist with over 15 years experience developing, leading and managing products and projects for major brands at home and abroad.
Right now I'm devising, validating and delivering content formats for smart speaker platforms such as Amazon Alexa with the BBC.
Previously, I've set up and led innovation programmes, designed multiple digital products and provided strategy recommendations for a former client that led to over £million more business.
My content credentials 'best of' looks like this: a lead role in 3 digital BAFTA award wins, TV credits and appearances, a UXUK award and a #1 App Store kids app.
Steve Keller is the Sonic Strategy Director for Pandora, the largest streaming music platform in the US. Recognized as one of the leading experts in the field of audio branding, he blends art and science into award-winning sonic strategies and creative content for a variety of global agencies and brands. With a degree in psychology and over 30 years of experience in the music and advertising industries, Steve’s work explores the ways music and sound impact consumer perception and behavior. Recent experiments have examined the relationship between sound and taste, the existence of audio archetypes, the relationship between personality traits and music preference, and how bias impacts the aesthetic judgements of advertising professionals. He is the recipient of the iHearMedia Scholarship for Leadership in Audio Innovation, and is currently completing his thesis for an Executive MBA through the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, focusing on how brands can more effectively measure and predict returns on audio investments.
For the past 12 years, I’ve led and executed design projects across a range of modalities (voice, touch, camera, device orientation) and device types (smart speakers, phones, smartwatches, smart glasses, TV, in-car IVI). I’m currently a Principal UX Designer on Amazon Alexa where I’m tackling some of the hardest problems in speech technologies and experiences. I lead design on many emerging topics of speech and develop CX strategies towards Alexa's north star. Prior to working this role, I’ve led many new, exciting projects including Alexa in cars, Alexa voice shopping, Dash Buttons, Amazon Apple Watch app, Fire Phone, and app navigation for the Amazon App.
Diana Mosa is the co-founder of Talking to Me, the first voice design-agency in the nordics as well as in the northern of Europe. She currently changing industries within Scandinavia by helping them go towards a more voice-first world by educating businesses and governments, setting their voice-strategies as well as designing and executing the voice-applications. She is also a diversity-activist and is trying to make sure diversity is the new normal in the tech-industry.
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Dylan has led product from the start of Pulse Labs, and he’s overseen testing on every voice application upon which Pulse Labs has worked.
He was previously the Director of Data Science for Overstock.com, where he built and ran the data science team. He loves figuring out and understanding how customers behave, so he can help make their lives better. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Utah, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in statistics, physics, and mathematics from Stanford University, where he was a President’s Scholar. He enjoys running, reading, and playing the violin.
Laura is a Google Developer Expert, mentor, and advocate. She has been involved in the tech industry for over 10 years. During the last two years, she has been traveling and doing talks in more than 20 cities around the world promoting the use of disruptive technologies and the concept of voice first. Currently, she consults within IT, voice strategy and she is one of the organizers of GDG Cloud London and a Women Techmakers Ambassador.
Katherine Prescott is the Founder & Editor of VoiceBrew, a digital media company focused on helping people get the most out of Alexa. Prior to launching VoiceBrew, Katherine was Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Strategy at Highbridge Capital Management, a global alternative investment firm where she spent eight years. She graduated from Harvard College in 2009.
Bradley Metrock is CEO of Nashville-based Score Publishing. Metrock founded podcast network VoiceFirst.FM, hosts the popular show This Week In Voice, published the audiobook Perspectives on Gender in #VoiceFirst Technology, and produces the company's series of VoiceFirst Events. He has been quoted by organizations as diverse as The Mayo Clinic to Voicebot.AI to Forbes to Harvard Business Review.
Diana Deibel is a speaker, writer and Lead Designer at the digital product design consultancy Grand Studio in Chicago, focused on leading their voice and future tech initiatives. She is also the founder of the Chicago brand of the Ubiquitous Voice Society. Her work mainly centers on omnichannel experiences using voice-first design.
In addition to writing and designing for bots, Diana is a produced playwright and screenwriter who has written and produced for a variety of networks including Animal Planet and Blue Man Group. She is the co-creator of the webseries The Underlings, and the in-development pilots Shytown, Automates and Frances, Choose.
Throughout all her work, Diana believes in creating stories and solutions representative of the diverse world we live in, and in questioning the outcomes of our creations.
Vince Farquharson is a multiplatform Interaction Designer at NPR. Besides voice-UI "home assistant" devices, He has designed for large screens (Xbox, Fire TV, Android TV), smart watches, and smart refrigerators. He is passionate about diversity and inclusion in Design. He believes great ideas come from everywhere.
Brian Bauman is a VUI Designer for Wolters Kluwer Health, where he creates outbound IVR calls to engage patients in managing their health. As a playwright, he's written over a dozen plays which have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado. He's been awarded three MacDowell Colony fellowships in playwriting. His play BUCKSHOT was published in the Brooklyn Review.
Jen is the Co-Founder and CCO of Vixen Labs - a strategy, experience design and marketing consultancy for voice and conversational interfaces.
Rashmi is an award-winning technologist and leader with 20+ years of experience. She is currently Senior Director, Early Customer Engagement at HARMAN, responsible for go-to market strategy and leadership of early customer pursuits to address new and emerging Business Models and Cross-Divisional/Department product portfolio. Rashmi oversees and cultivates client relationships while driving technical knowledge and strategy across Business Units to bring unique and new products and experiences to the market.
Dr. Ahmed Bouzid is Founder and CEO of Witlingo, a Washington DC based startup that builds products and solutions for Voice First devices and platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. Prior to Witlingo, Dr. Bouzid was Head of Alexa's Smart Home Product at Amazon and VP of Product and Innovation at Angel.com. Dr. Bouzid is also co-founder and Director of the Ubiquitous Voice Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the mission of evangelizing the emerging voice interface, and author of two books on Voice User Interface design. Dr. Bouzid holds 12 patents in the Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing field, and is a visiting lecturer at Weber State University. Dr. Bouzid was recognized as a “Speech Luminary” by Speech Technology Magazine.
Rebecca Evanhoe is a conversational designer for Amazon Web Services’ Emerging Technologies team, and an author. For the last 8 years as a conversational designer, she has created virtual characters for conversation-based learning games, chatbots for fun and service, and interactive voice experiences.
Alex Kaplunovich is a well-established entrepreneur, a technology leader and a worldwide presenter. He is an expert in evolving technologies, AWS Certified solutions architect. His expertise lies in the areas of Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Serverless Architectures, Data Analytics and Databases. As a CTO of Advanced Technology Experts, Alex manages development of multiple innovative products, improves overall quality and reliability of software systems, assuring the best practices and most efficient architectures are implemented using the best technologies available. He received his B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1994 and 1997 respectively. Presently, Mr. Kaplunovich is finishing his PhD. In Computer Science. Mr. Kaplunovich has published numerous papers in prestigious refereed journals and refereed conference proceedings and presented at the prestigious industry and academic conferences in the areas of Cloud Computing, Machine Learning and Serverless Architectures. Alex has wife and four children.
A rare mix of scientist and businessman, Alex is a well-regarded innovator in the field of speech and natural language processing, interactive voice response systems and behavioral informatics. He has over 20 years of leadership experience both in the corporate and entrepreneurial sides of business. His background includes working at AT&T Labs-Research, Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies and is a co-founder of Alesman. His academic achievements have gone hand in hand with his extensive research work, receiving his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University and later his MBA from the Stern School of Business, NYU. Alex lives in Los Angeles where he enjoys kayaking and sailing.
By day, Allen is a Senior Developer at Objective Consulting, where he helps clients understand how to apply new technologies to make their lives, and the lives of their customers, better. By night, Allen is a Google Developer Expert for the Google Assistant, helping developers do much the same thing - understand Voice Agents so they can create the next generation of software and let users do new and innovative things with voice. He first became involved in voice with Google Glass, and is the co-author of the book Designing and Developing for Google Glass published by O'Reilly.
Amy Summers launched Pitch Publicity in 2003, in the face of a rapidly changing climate for communication and media relations. She has 20 years experience in securing publicity and developing communication strategies for influential experts in medicine, science, tech, finance and international corporations and nonprofit organizations. Summers campaigns have resulted in billions of media impressions worldwide and she’s credited as the first to strategize live media interviews at both the deepest and highest points of the planet (scientific laboratory, 63 feet beneath the sea and Mount Everest summit, 21,000 feet above sea level). She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Public Relations from the University of Florida; serves on UF Alumni Association national board of directors, UF College of Journalism and Communications Public Relations Advisory Council and produces one of the most highly ranked communications Flash Briefing for Amazon’s Alexa Skills, “The Pitch with Amy Summers.”
Ananya Sharan is the Product Manager for Pandora’s Voice Mode, a new, native smart assistant that allows listeners to control Pandora’s mobile app and enjoy new music discovery using simple voice commands. Ananya has deep experience as a Search PM and is passionate about helping customers effortlessly discover and find products they love. She has an MBA from Duke University, the Fuqua School of Business, and an undergraduate degree in CS Engineering.
Arek has over 10 years of experience in IT and leadership. Working in various roles at leading European tech startups LiveChat and Estimote, Arek is on the forefront of modern technology and Artificial Intelligence. As CTO at Lekta, he leads their Research and Product team delivering the highest caliber solutions to global enterprise companies. Combining industry experience, academic research and their own technology solutions—Lekta helps customers visualize, plan and execute AI and other technology driven change that results in decreased Customer Care cost burdens, high Customer Satisfaction and growth in Sales opportunities.
Audrey Arbeeny is the Founder, CEO and Executive Producer of Audiobrain, widely recognized as global leaders in sonic branding. Audiobrain’s iconic sonic branding initiatives includes Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Google, Holland America Line, IBM, KIA Motors Corp, Microsoft, Bayer Healthcare, Logitech, Whirlpool, Toshiba, and many others. Audrey is on the Board of Governors of the National Academy of Television Arts and Science New York Chapter, and has been Music Supervisor for nine Olympic Broadcasts with NBC, for which she has received 2 Emmy Awards. With over 20 years specializing in sonic branding, Audiobrain is at the forefront of emerging technologies, and their sonic imprints are heard every day throughout the world. Audrey teaches and lectures on sonic branding at Pratt Institute and is a visiting lecturer and mentor of the Masters In Branding Program at School of Visual Arts, has appeared in many publications and has authored must-read articles on the use of intentional music, sound and voice.
Bob has been recognized by Amazon as an Alexa Champion and is a leading subject matter expert in the voice industry. Bob has a deep enterprise IT background that spans 20 years. Prior to VoiceXP, Bob was a RedHat Certified Engineer and considered a subject matter expert on Cloud Computing, Cloud Migration, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. Bob’s last role was as an executive at CenturyLink where he managed the Cloud Ecosystem and Evangelism Programs, Cloud Marketplace, and a product owner for Managed Services. Recently, Bob bought a water lily farm in the Missouri Ozark Mountains and relocated his family to the country.
Bonnie Canziani is an Associate Professor in the Joseph M. Bryan School of Business and Economics at The University of North Carolina Greensboro. Dr. Canziani currently teaches in the areas of service management and global/cultural issues. She holds a bachelor's degree in Spanish and Linguistics and the Masters and Doctorate in Hotel Administration from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Dr. Canziani’s research focuses on the management of customer service relationships and business profitability in various sectors including hospitality, tourism, wine, and transportation. She has studied the nexus and co-influence of customer and company in myriad ways, including host/guest relationships; customers as co-producers of service quality; customer service enhancement in hotels and wineries; and more recently, the role of voice-assisted devices such as Amazon Alexa in service encounters. Her work in service management serendipitously yielded consulting opportunities in website usability, given that websites are an additional point of customer contact with the hospitality firm. She is a Coleman Fellow in Entrepreneurship and a fellow of the Direct Selling Educational Foundation.
I have lived and worked in several countries: originally from South Africa, then 10 years in the UK, and most recently 10 years of living in New Zealand. I have worked in both startups and corporates such as Vodafone and The Carphone Warehouse. Most of my time has been in tech and communications. I have started and grown several businesses across the different countries I have lived in and love working in new tech and taking it to market to make a difference in people's lives. I'm an experienced Executive and Advisory Board Member with a demonstrated history of working in the Tech industry globally. A strong professional skilled in SaaS, Tech, Start-up Environments, Marketing Management, Strategy, High Growth businesses, and Sales. A people leader and team builder. I'm fascinated by Fintech, AI and Blockchain
Brendon Stead is the Senior Vice President of Product Development for Sound United. For the past eight years, first with D+M and now with Sound United, he has led product development and design across the Sound United brands, including Denon, Marantz, Polk Audio, Definitive Technology, and others. He has broad experience in global product innovation, development and management. Prior to joining Sound United, Brendon spent 13 years at Harman, most recently as VP of Product engineering. Brendon’s experience gives him a unique view on how experiential products tie into electronics industry trends, including voice integration, IoT and virtual reality.
My name is Brian Plaskon, I am a product owner at Realogy, and my product is a voice assistant for real estate agents.
Brian is the Vice President of Engineering at SpinDance, a software consultancy dedicated to helping organizations developing awesome IoT products. A software craftsman and technical speaker with over 20 years of experience, Brian has helped some of the largest companies in the world adopt and ship voice-enabled products. As a "full stack IoT" engineer and business leader, Brian contributes daily to the strategy, development and support of distributed, multimodal systems. When he's not creating the future, he enjoys cooking and exploring his home state of Michigan with his family.
Brooke Hawkins is a designer in the world of voice and conversational interfaces. Her experience in the industry is vast, having designed voice experiences for healthcare institutions, nonprofits, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. Brooke’s work sits at the intersection of designing useful and meaningful interactions, as well as creating scholarship around the ethics surrounding our future of living in a voice interface mediated world. Brooke has spoken at the IA Summit and the Voice Summit, as well as a variety of industry podcasts like Machine Yearning, VoiceFirstFM and more. Brooke also is committed to training and educating a new generation of talent, and co-authored the Career Foundry course Intro to VUI design.
Bruce Epstein is head of US operations for AEBIS, a Paris-based boutique automation services firm. Bruce spent the first half of his career delivering complex real-time embedded systems at companies including Allen-Bradley, Digital Equipment, Alcatel, and Mannesmann – first in the US and then in France. In 2004, he joined AEBIS in Paris, applying his acquired skills in complex technical and organizational projects. Notable clients include BNP-Paribas, CNP Assurances, Natixis, Reuters, Société Générale, and Travel Technology. Since 2016, Bruce has been based in NY. Bruce holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester and an MS in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
Bruce is Co-founder and CEO of AgVoice. He was raised in western Missouri, where his family actively farms over 4,000 acres, and an orchard of 40,000 apple trees. He has over 20 years of experience in tech leadership positions at IBM, NCR & AGCO Corporation. He led solution management and marketing teams for multi-billion dollar product lines. For AgVoice, Bruce provides a vision which foresees increased use of hands-free enabled technology and powerful cloud data analytics within everyday farming and ranching operations for delivering expanded utility and continuous ease-of-use. Bruce has a Bachelor of Science degree in Agriculture Economics from the University of Missouri and an MBA from the University of North Carolina.
Callan Schebella is co-founder and CEO at Inference Solutions. Inference Solutions provides a SaaS platform that allows you to create Intelligent Virtual Agent experiences on the carrier network of your choice. The Inference platform is sold by more than 35 telecommunication carriers around the world. Callan has spent his entire career in the machine learning and spoken dialog space. Prior to Inference, he worked at Telstra Research Laboratories and developed software tools used to automate complex conversational environments. Callan is based in San Francisco but is originally from Melbourne, Australia.
Carissa is passionate about inclusive design and accessibility, working closely with UX and development to build empathy and create delightful, accessible solutions from inception to production. She believes in the democratization of information, that accessibility is a solveable design challenge and everything is (and should be) a work in progress.
Clinton has been an investor, director, and CEO of several publicly-traded and private companies during the past fifteen years, including roles with restaurant and retail companies. In 2017 he co-founded Novo Labs to create artificial intelligence services that push the frontier for how intelligent systems can interact with live consumer environments. Today, Novo Labs develops and manages conversational commerce services for the restaurant industry, with a focus on high-volume voice channels such as phone or drive-thru orders.
Colleen Fahey is a creative executive with deep expertise in branding and marketing at multiple touch points. When she learned of Sixième Son, a Paris audio branding agency that had created over 350 audio brands, she approached them about expanding their borders to North America. Since then, her team has led Sixième Son’s audio branding initiatives for Atlanta, Michelin, Huggies, CAT Footwear, a research hospital, a college, a global vaccine launch, a medical technology, an AIDS treatment, a manufacturer, an addiction recovery behemoth, a news network…and counting. She has also co-authored the book, Audio Branding: Using Sound to Build Your Brand. Throughout her career, Colleen has worked for major marketing organizations and leading brands in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia. She served as Executive Creative Director at Frankel (now Arc), where she also ran a thriving business unit and simultaneously carried executive responsibility for Human Resources and Employee Development, managing over 150 mostly right-brained people. Post the sale of Frankel to Publicis, Colleen moved onto a global Publicis Worldwide strategic team based in Paris, her role was to support the network of agencies with branding, path-to-purchase, activation and kids marketing initiatives around the world. Raised in Madrid, she speaks fluent Spanish as well as conversational French and pathetic Portuguese.
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Dagmar Schuller, CEO and co-founder, led audEERING, AI innovation leader, to a multi-million company. For more than a decade, she conducts research in the areas of AI, machine learning and big data with the aim to embed intelligent audio analysis into real-life concepts, thus utilizing the technology for everyone. Dagmar Schuller and her team are constantly developing applications for new areas ranging from health, automotive, marketing and communication to smart personal assistants.
Daniel Hill is obsessed with figuring what grabs people's attention and holds it. What makes someone tap the "like" button or double tap on a picture? What makes someone post the crying emoji or share a post with their private text message group? Daniel currently works at Columbia University Medical Center and runs DanielHillMedia, where he teaches small business owners how to use Instagram. He hosts an Instagram podcast, called "The Instagram Stories", and launched the first Instagram Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing Skill where he gives daily news updates and answers questions. You can find him on Instagram @danielhillmedia.
David Yakobovitch is a Principal Data Scientist at Galvanize, responsible for delivering global instruction, curriculum development and customer support. He also partners with Engagement Managers and Account Executives for the Corporate arm of the business, Galvanize Enterprise. David previously served as Lead Data Scientist for Enterprise with General Assembly in 2017 and 2018, for the Fortune 500 portfolio. General Assembly was acquired by Adecco for $413 million in 2018. Prior to General Assembly, David served as Chief of Staff for the BIG3 Basketball League from 2016 to 2017. Prior to BIG3, David served in a variety of roles in Banks and Insurance Providers from 2010 to 2015, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, ADP, and Aflac. David currently serves as an advisor of The Carpentries and Futureworks. David is the Host of HumAIn, an AI Podcast that shares consumer trends from Industry-Leading Executives at Fortune 500s and start-ups in the 4th Industrial Revolution. David grew up in the United States. He received an undergraduate degree in business administration and information systems from University of Florida and is pursuing a PhD in Advanced Research at Capitol Technology University.
Davis Park develops and directs all FPCIW’s technology initiatives and programs. The FPCIW is a center of excellence in Front Porch, one of Southern California’s largest not-for-profit providers of retirement living communities and affordable housing. Davis has two decades of program development experience in technology implementation in senior, low-income, and other underserved communities to explore and deploy innovations to help people live well. He has served as a presenter or facilitator in dozens of regional, national, and international conferences. Davis is the former director of Community Technology Programs at the Little Tokyo Service Center, where he managed several community-based initiatives designed to bridge the digital divide. Davis is also an inaugural member of the Zero Divide ZFellows, a program that promoted technology adoption and social justice to underserved communities. He has served on several boards and committees dedicated to promoting technology access, adoption, and policy, and is a current advisory board member for OASIS LA and PowerMyLearning. Davis holds a BA in anthropology from UC Berkeley and a MA from UCLA’s Urban Planning Program.
Deborah Dahl is Principal of Conversational Technologies, which advises its clients on speech, natural language and dialog technologies. Her focus is on implementations of practical and scalable conversational systems that push the boundary between theory and applications. Her clients range in size from startups to large enterprises and government organizations. She has written many technical papers as well as three books, including Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Toward Natural Interfaces to Everything, published in 2016.
DeLonn is the Co-Founder / CEO of SayKid. Prior to SayKid, he held leadership roles intersecting consumer, technology, and education with Target, Deloitte Consulting, and Google. He also led two equity-backed ventures to successful outcomes. In 2014, he turned around a division that had invested $1B+ in education, where he gained appreciation for the structural challenges and disruptive potential in early education. Having grown up in a low-income household himself and nearly dropping out of a community college, the experience also gave him hope. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School, and BSB from the University of Minnesota, and AA from Normandale Community College.
Derek received his bachelors of arts from the University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, he attended Stanford University, where he received both his Ph.D and J.D. It was during law school that Derek became interested in the tech world. Post academia, he moved onto more technical roles leading development teams. Then in 2006, Derek started at Sitecore as the VP of Technical Services. He managed Sitecore’s CMS technical support, training, and pre-sales support for the North American market for 12 years. Along the way, Derek became intrigued with conversational AI and how it could revolutionize enterprise solutions, so he joined Cognigy as the VP of Technology where he’s tasked with helping his clients understand the power of cognitive psychology.
Domhnaill Hernon is Head of Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.) at Nokia Bell Labs. He graduated with a B.Eng in Aeronautical Engineering, a Ph.D in fundamental fluid mechanics from the University of Limerick and an Executive M.B.A. from Dublin City University, Ireland. He is passionate about turning research/ideas into reality and exploring the bounds of creativity to push the limits of technology. Domhnaill was previously responsible for turning Bell Labs disruptive research assets into proto-solutions that could be tested at scale in the market and he established new methods to overcome the “Innovation Valley of Death”. He is currently responsible for Bell Labs global activities in E.A.T. where he collaborates with the artistic/creative community to push the limits of technology to solve the greatest human need challenges
Dominik is co-founder of 169 Labs in Munich and Cologne, one of the leading german voice assistant agencies. He brings 15 years of experience from consulting work and digital projects to the agency. He advises on strategy, business models, digital processes and innovative applications in the world of voice interfaces.
Dr. Robin Kiera is most appreciated as an expert, speaker, influencer recognized in several ranking in both Insurtech and Fintech industries. With Digitalscouting as a platform for corporate innovators, thought leaders, events, and entrepreneurs - he became an in-demand member of the advisory committees of conferences and also serves as a sparring partner for corporate conferences and start-up mentor for digital strategy and execution. For your business consultation needs, go to https://bit.ly/2YL8gXE, need a speaker and media partnership go to https://bit.ly/2wfgJWO
Duane Forrester is the Vice President of Industry Insights for Yext, leading industry outreach, evangelism and authorship for the company. Between Microsoft and Yext, he was the VP, Operations with Bruce Clay, Inc, where he lead the operations for organic and paid search, social, content and design. Prior to moving to BCI, he was a Sr. Product Manager responsible for Bing’s Webmaster Program, focused on helping small, medium and enterprise businesses improve their digital marketing efforts. Previously, he was an inhouse SEM running the SEO program for MSN in the US & Americas. He's also the founding co-chair of SEMPO's In-House SEM Committee, was formerly on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is the author of two books: How To Make Money With Your Blog & Turn Clicks Into Customers. Duane has written for publications ranging from SearchEngineLand and DuctTape Marketing, to Entrepreneur Magazine, the New York Times and Inc. He actively advises startups and large corporations, and even spent time advising the staff who maintain the White House's websites.
Prof. Ehud Reiter serves as the Chief Scientist at ARRIA NLG Limited. Prof. Reiter is responsible for overall direction of technology development as well as supervision of specific NLG projects. He is Professor of Computing Science in the University of Aberdeen School of Natural and Computing Sciences, founder of the University's NLG Research Group and a founder and director of Data2Text. Ehud is also Chair of SigGen, a special interest group of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Reiter co-authored the de-facto textbook on NLG systems, "Building Natural Language Generation Systems", and is one of the main developers of the Simplenlg open-source NLG library.
Filip is a software engineer who participated in an Alexa development workshop last summer hoping to simply get an interesting project on his resume, but instead has been implementing voice apps ever since. His lifelong passion for language and technology make him feel right at home in the fascinating world of virtual assistants. He joined Rocket Insights, the fastest growing product agency in the US, to redesign a skill for FX Networks using Alexa Presentation Language while it was still in private beta and ported it to Google Assistant as well.
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Florian is product manager for Jovo Studios, where he works with leading brands to create engaging and valuable voice experiences. Having produced two popular game Skills for Alexa, Florian shares his journey of becoming an expert on voice games on his Medium blog and as an international speaker.
Frank Schneider is the CEO of artificial intelligence listening company, Speakeasy AI, whose mission and technology is based upon the premise of listening to understand, not merely respond. He was born and raised in Philadelphia, a city where listening is equal parts human empathy and survival, Frank spent the bulk of his 22 professional years in roles where active listening is of paramount importance. Frank has taught elementary, middle and high school and worked with adult ‘English as a second language’ students fleeing war-torn countries, and teens who were court adjudicated. He has coached basketball players and sales reps, counselled convicted felons, teachers and corporate teams in conflict resolution and peer mediation. Frank explains the history of listening software, in typed conversations between humans and chatbots. Now we’re speaking vocally to artificial intelligence, famously to assistants like Alexa and Google Home. However, your voice is still transcribed word for word and sent into very similar algorithms to those that powered chatbots. This is listening to transcribe, not listening for meaning or understanding. Advanced listening AI, that Frank works with, attempts to understand what we’re saying from the moment we say hello. Real listening examines the type of language that’s being used and also incorporates context. In this way, it should be accurate, helpful and effective at large scale. Frank also talks about why listening is pivotal to being a basketball coach. No matter how you coach, you’re not playing the game, so you need to listen to your team to get on-the-field knowledge about what’s happening. The players have something to say, so in order to give the best advice, guidance and direction, you need to have their input onboard.
Freddie Feldman is the Voice Design Director for Wolters Kluwer Health in Chicago. He leads a team of amazing voice designers focused on creating patient-engagement IVR phone calls that have resulted in over 15 million phone interactions to date. These IVR calls are a part of a broader product portfolio providing personalized, dynamic communication to patients over time. Freddie also provides feedback, subject-matter expertise, and advocacy for emerging voice-based products across the WK portfolio. He has been developing a strategic vision for voice-based products and helping to create compelling demonstrations of voice technologies.
Garrick Gauch (Co-Founder/Partner at MadValley Labs) Boston Garrick is an accomplished digital technology executive with extensive experience with consumer brands on all aspects of mobile marketing and channel deployments, including; mobile-first strategy, UX design thinking, emerging tech innovation, ecosystem integration, and user analytics and retention. As co-founder and partner of MadValley Labs, Garrick seeks to combine elements of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley - to support brands with the emerging tools of digital storytelling.
Dr. Sandhu is a leading expert in Voice Recognition and AI in healthcare. Harjinder was the former CTO of Nuance Health and a pioneer in speech recognition.
Harish is the product owner for audio advertising at Pandora. He oversees iterative creation of new audio ad formats, like dynamic audio. He is also interested in areas where music intersects advertising along with sonic attributes of audio advertising. You can learn more about him on his linkedin profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/harishgoli/
Ilker is the CEO & Co-founder of Botanalytics, conversational analytics company based in San Francisco. Having background of Computer Science & MBA. Ilker is a regular speaker about conversational analytics, artificial intelligence, and early-stage fundraising. He's also been selected to Forbes 30 Under 30, 2018 Enterprise Technology category.
Jason is the chief strategy officer for Voicify. Jason acts as a collaborator and leader with Voicify’s partners and customers, enabling them to leverage the power of the Voicify platform to engage with their customers and prospects. Jason is an evangelist, speaker, thought leader and strategist for the company. Jason is passionate about personalizing the relationships between brands and customers, for the betterment of both. He believes in finding the ‘Youtility’ of what brands can do to better the experiences of those they serve.
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I am a digital marketing strategist, adjunct professor of digital marketer at Cleveland State University, podcaster, online course creator, and founder of The Front Row mastermind.
Jenni has been creating voice user interfaces since 2000 and is currently Principal, Conversation Design at Banter Technology. She has been involved in all aspects of projects from requirements to design, usability testing, tuning, and ongoing evaluation and improvement of systems in production. Jenni’s designs have improved customer conversations for dozens of organizations in variety of business domains. Since 2016, Jenni has been designing conversations for smart speakers, cars, and robots. She was a founding Board Member of the Association of Voice Interaction Design(AVIxD) and spearheaded the creation of AVIxD’s VUI design guidelines.
Jeremy Wilken is a software engineer at VMware and Google Developer Expert for Google Assistant and Angular. He runs the Design for Voice podcast, which focuses on educating about practical design techniques for voice experiences. He is the author of Ionic in Action and Angular 2 in Action, as well as a regular speaker at events around the world. Jeremy lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughters. When he isn't coding, you can find him brewing beer.
Jochen Emig is the Founder and CEO of ONSEI GmbH, an agency that consults on, builds and maintains conversational interfaces for companies such as Allianz, car2go, Edeka and Telekom. Prior to starting ONSEI in Berlin, Germany, Jochen worked as a developer and technical lead at startups in Japan, Singapore and the US.
John is currently VP at ID R&D, Inc., a New York-based provider of multi-modal biometric technologies with best-in-class voice biometrics for mobile and web. He began his work with biometrics in 2006 at Voxeo Corp, acquired by Aspect Software in 2013 where John served as VP of Product Management. In 2015, John became president of Voice Biometrics Group, then joined the team at ID R&D in September 2018. John has 35 years of experience in voice, IVR, and contact centers at Dialogic, Intel, Voxeo, Aspect, and AT&T. He earned his MSEE from Stanford and a BSEE from North Carolina State University, where he also serves as a member of the Strategic Advisory Board for the ECE Department.
John G is an Alexa Champion and creative producer exploring the impact of voice on the creation and consumption of digital culture. He’s published 20 Alexa skills, including Chop Chop, an award winning multi-modal kitchen companion. He worked with the NFL to design & build their first Alexa skill and won the Alexa Hackathon at re:invent. His work draws from experience in audio engineering, music production, talent & brand management, creative development and content strategy on emerging platforms. At The Walt Disney Company & Maker Studios, John collaborated with some of the world’s most prolific video creators across kids, music, comedy, & gaming to grow audience and develop new IP in partnership with platforms, publishers and brands.
John has over 25 years of experience in software development and architecture. While at Microsoft for twelve years, he worked with a variety of clients in heath care, FinTech, and pharma. Most recently he co-founded Whetstone Technologies, a start up focused on delivering innovative solution on smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home.
John Kelvie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bespoken, the leaders in automated testing and monitoring for voice. We have more than 5,000 developers using our software, 1,000 voice apps being monitored, and we work with brands like Mercedes-Benz R&D, the NFL, Expedia and many more to ensure they are building the best possible voice experiences.
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John Morabito is a skilled and multifaceted marketer, speaker and blogger with over 8 years of experience in SEO, PPC, and performance digital marketing channels. With a background starting in dentistry, then electronics he’s a former in-house marketer turned SEO Director on the agency side with a deep passion for educating peers and clients. He specializes in technical and off-site SEO, within the e-commerce & CPG verticals for brands like Drybar, Hain Celestial, and jane iredale. In 2018 as Director of SEO at Stella Rising, he was honored with a nomination for Search Personality of the Year, and his team won the Search Engine Land Award for Best Large Agency — SEO. Nominations & Awards: SEO Team of the Year Drum Search Awards 2017 Search Engine Land Large SEO Agency of The Year 2018 Best Large Agency SEO Team US Search Awards 2018 Best SEO Campaign US Search Awards 2018 3x Best SEO Campaign Drum Search Awards 2018 Best SEO Team Drum Search Awards 2018 Search Personality of the Year 2018
Conversation designer with experience delivering multi-modal conversational interactions in mobile apps. This includes dialogue design, VUI, configuration, usability testing, localization, NLP/speech and analytics. My background is as a linguist with expertise in speech and conversation/discourse. 10+ years of experience in research, experiments, surveys, stats, quantitative and qualitative data analysis and fluency in German and French.
One of the few entrepreneurs in the US to build a gigabit fiber network from scratch, Joshua is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience. The ISP he built, Wicked Broadband, featured in Wired and Forbes is a testament of net neutrality support and underlying principles long before they became a buzz phrase. Joshua is an Air Force Captain, an aerospace engineer, and a hacker at heart. He oversees all aspects of Mycroft and is a firm supporter of the open source movement committed to an open future for AI.
Juby George-Vaze, RN, CCM, MBA is the CEO & Chief Innovation Officer of Globex Health, a company that she founded to help hospitals, providers and employers successfully navigate the new healthcare landscape using her immersive clinical knowledge and the latest Big Data Analytics, Telehealth, AI, Population Health and Blockchain Payment technologies. Capitalizing on newer reimbursement guidelines and proprietary technology, Globex Health have expanded into enablement of telehealth & remote monitoring, bringing post-acute care, chronic disease management and eldercare/post acute care into the population health umbrella. AI/Bot based tools and IoT are also components of solutions. Juby’s 20+ years of experience in various roles have enabled her to understand healthcare from the different parts that makes up the whole continuum. She has worked as a nurse, operations manager, disease management cost containment expert, financial administrator and technologist. She also brings the perspective of the patient, living successfully with chronic conditions and rare genetic disease. Prior to Globex Health, at Anthem & its many subsidiaries including Empire BC/BS, she led transformations to various payment models, including Value-Based Payment, Pay for Performance, Shared Risk and Accountable Care Organizations in addition to developing and running many complex disease management programs and working on it’s AmericanWell practice version products. Juby currently serves on the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Blockchain Task Force and Nurse Informatics Group. She is also on the Board of Directors of the New York Chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). She serves on the New Jersey Tech Council’s Life Sciences Advisory Council and is a co-orgainzer of Health 2.0 NYC – The NY Healthcare Innovation Group. She is also advisor and mentor to several startups including health tech and blockchain companies. Juby is licensed as a Registered Nurse in New York and New Jersey and is Certified Case Manager (CCM). Juby holds an MBA in Health Systems Management and a Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc), both from Pace University.
I work with C-level executives to tackle the challenges with and the opportunities to lead by “disrupting the status quo” - within their organizations and their markets. With a Bachelor's in Chemical Engineering and an MBA, I have dedicated my career to helping organizations fix critical business problems through the Acceleration + Application + Adoption of Innovation - by supporting the Buyers + Sellers + Investors in this equation. Industries that I've served: Aerospace, Agriculture, Automotive, Capital Equipment, Chemical, Computer, Construction, Cosmetics, Defense, Energy, Environmental (Air, Water, Wastewater, HazMat), Financial Services, Food + Beverage, Government, Healthcare, IT, IoT + IIoT, Metals, Microelectronics, Mining, Oil + Gas, Paint + Coatings, Plastics, Pharmaceutical + BioTech, Printing, Pulp+Paper, Retail, Sensors, Software, Textiles...
Justin Hendrix is Executive Director of NYC Media Lab, a public-private partnership between the City’s industry and its universities to drive emerging media and technology innovation and entrepreneurship, and the founding Executive Director of RLab, a new 16,500 square foot facility including co-working labs, classrooms, studios, and more in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that is New York’s City’s home for VR, AR and spatial computing. RLab is the nation’s first city-funded center for research, entrepreneurship and education in virtual and augmented-reality, spatial computing and other emerging media technologies. Previously he was Vice President, Business Development & Innovation for The Economist. He holds a BA from the College of William & Mary and an MSc in Technology Commercialization from the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin.
Kasia Ryniak is a co-founder of Upside - one of the leading European strategic and technological agencies that focus on bringing brands to voice platforms. She helps companies to understand the power of voice and design great Voice User Interfaces. Kasia truly values sharing experience and knowledge in the field of voice - she's a co-organizer of Create For Voice meetups in Poland, member of Women in Voice community, founder and a lead writer at the first Polish web portal promoting a deeper understanding of voice technologies.
Kevin Park has had a distinguished career as a leader in business and technology. Currently he’s a faculty member at NYU (2013) and NYiT (2007) and co-founder/director of UX design at ObjectivEye, a startup that provides a deep understanding and customized UX/UI design and analysis to the AR/VR industry. Kevin is co-creator of the AR/VR Diploma program and UX Design Professional Diploma program at NYU and AR/VR Certificate program at NYiT. Their mission is to bring students through a fast-paced program that will advance their understanding of AR/VR and UX/UI in the world today. Kevin has well over 20+ years of professional experience in the art, design and emerging tech culture. He’s worked as a Senior UX Design Manager at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for 17 years, Design Consultant for Pentagram, Antenna International, Smithsonian Museum, MoMA, Guggenheim, The Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, McDonald’s. Kevin has been influential to the culture of design and remains unmatched through his passion of bridging the gap of AR/VR technology through our daily lives today.
Kyree is a proud native Philadelphian who has lived all across the city. Originally on track to pursue a career in marketing, she serendipitously discovered the user experience field and fell in love with it. She is currently a User Experience Researcher at Comcast, leading research efforts to enhance current Xfinity products and services and inform the design of future projects. Now wanting to introduce others to the user experience field, she founded Onyx Valley, a community building organization designed to identify and prepare diverse talent for careers in the tech field. Launched in 2016 out of the Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship’s startup incubator, Onyx Valley has hosted several events and workshops to generate interest in user experience. Onyx Valley is currently gearing up to launch the first wave of projects for Onyx Valley Studios, a student-led design consultancy agency. Kyree is a graduate of Howard University’s School of Business and completed her Master’s degree in Design at Carnegie Mellon University.
As a voice actor, Lea Gulino has worked on everything from Videogames to National Commercials. Lea holds a BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She has recorded ADR at Skywalker Sound, extended projects for Dolby and over 8 years of IVR for Cisco Systems. Lea currently serves on the Advisory Board of SAGAFTRA San Francisco/Northern California and is a member of the National Voiceover Committee. She lives with her husband on their wooden boat in and around San Francisco Bay.
Lin Nie is a Research Scientist in HCI/Psychology at Dataminr’s AI group. Recognized as one of the world’s leading businesses in AI and Machine Learning innovation, Dataminr discovers high-impact events and critical breaking information for clients in 70 countries cross industries long before it's in the news. Before Dataminr, she was a user experience consultant at AnswerLab where she led original research efforts exploring topics of voice and AI, in addition to leading user research to help fortune 500 brands create experiences people love. She is an experienced UX professional who has conducted research at various stages of product development for clients including Facebook, Instagram, Google, American Express, Amazon, TE Connectivity, etc. Lin holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. She studied human perception and embodied cognition, with the group of psychologists that started the ‘affordance’ concept and the formal research around it. Her research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence has appeared in Wired and Slate.
As a conversational linguist and an ethnographer, Madeleine Adkins brings an in-depth knowledge of language to all her professional pursuits. A speaker of five languages who has lived in Europe, Asia, and North America, Madeleine’s international perspective has enhanced her work in the fields of intercultural business communication, education, research, and writing. Her new goal is to draw on her background and contribute to the development of conversation design in the world of voice.
Mahek A. Shah leads the Value Measurement for Health Care projects at Harvard Business School. As Senior Researcher & Project Director, he designs and implements time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) globally to help providers, governments, and employers understand the actual costs of care delivery. He focuses on maximizing value for all stakeholders through reorganization of care delivery & disruptive innovation, improving the care experience for all. He sits at the intersection of health, business, and technology. Dr. Shah is the co-author of several Harvard Business School case studies. He's published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, World Health Organization, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. Shah delivered a TEDx talk at Harvard: Bringing Patient-centered Design to Healthcare. Shah speaks globally on the future of health care delivery, value-based care, innovative delivery models, and the business of healthcare. Previously, Dr. Shah worked on Wall Street as an investment banker at Citigroup.
Malte Kosub is co-founder and managing director of Future of Voice GmbH. The company was one of the first in Germany to work with Amazon’s Alexa; in fact, it was appointed by Amazon as the first and by now only “German Alexa champion”. Within his role in the company, Malte advises customers such as Vodafone, Allianz, ERGO, Bauer Media and Unilever on the topic of voice assistants. Before founding Future of Voice, Malte previously founded the e-commerce startup “Wandnotiz”, which was then sold in early 2017 to a medium-sized printshop network. Beyond this, he brought to life the largest music competition for schools in Germany: “Talented”. He has received several awards for his outstanding voluntary work, including awards from the German ministry of economics and from the Hermann Ehlers Foundation. He is faculty member of the Futur/io Institute as well as Kairos Society Fellow. Malte completed his economics degree at the University of Hamburg, at Harvard University, and at MIT.
Mandy Chan is a Developer Advocate for the Google Assistant, where she is responsible for creating practical tools and content for the developer community. At I/O 2018, Mandy and the team published two Codelabs to guide developers on how to build Actions. Since then, the Codelabs have trained thousands of new developers from around the world. She is a frequent speaker at different developer conferences, including the Grace Hopper Conference and Google IO 2019. You can find her talk at bit.ly/io19-aog She was invited as a guest on the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. You can hear more about her recent activities on bit.ly/gcp-mandy. Prior to Google, she made many early contributions to the voice community. One of her most frequently downloaded open source projects is called SSML Builder. You can learn more about Mandy by following her on Twitter (@MandyChanNYC)!
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Marc Ladin was a tech startup CMO for the first 25 years of his career and now is a full-time investor in voice tech startups. Marc launched VoicePunch.VC, an early stage investment fund focused on cross-platform startups in voice and related technologies. Before becoming a full-time investor, Marc led the marketing and strategy functions at several successful tech startups in the communications space, including TigerText, Everbridge, Internet America, and PDQ.net.
Career Brand Management and Marketing Strategy Leader for well-known B2C/B2B2C brands at best-in-class global organizations and startup experience, including Advisor to eading interactive audio stories platform, Earplay.
A self-described military brat, Melissa spent her formative years moving from place to place across the U.S. A SCAD educated graphic designer and former owner of a patent illustration business, she oversees all aspects of design for Novel Effect. She loves fancy pens and has an growing collection of sketchbooks waiting to be filled. She lives in Seattle with her husband and their four children, only two of which have fur.
I have two decades of experience in creating, operating and marketing live events. My strong entrepreneurial skills and tendencies include strategic planning, fundraising and execution. I am passionate about my work and the people I work with. I've lead diverse teams, often in heavily unionized environments. I am currently partnered with Satisfi Labs to bring an intelligent ticketing agent to live events powered by AI and NLP technology.
Michael is an Irish electronics engineer who has worked in the Assistive Technology field for the last decade. He’s worked in some of Ontario’s leading rehab hospitals for both kids and adults, helping individuals with mobility issues communicate, drive their wheelchairs, and control their homes independently. Michael has worked with over 350 clients with various levels of need, from Cerebral Palsy to ALS, and has enabled his clients greater control over their environment. Michael’s mission is to remove barriers so everyone can access the world in which they live.
Michael Meyer, CISSP, CIPP/US, CIPM, FIP, CISM, CRVPM II, CRISC, CISA, is the Chief Risk and Security Officer (CRO, CSO) of MRS BPO LLC. He is responsible for overseeing the company’s governance and strategy for enterprise risk management, security, and compliance. Michael’s team provides independent oversight, guidance for managing risk, ensuring security and compliance, including the development and implementation of risk management and technology strategies for clients. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University and a master’s degree in Technology Management from Georgetown University.
Michael Novak is a Digital Transformation expert and business executive with over 15 years of experience helping enterprises leverage emerging technologies to make better business decisions, drive revenue growth, and increase customer satisfaction. He is focused on how voice AI can reduce workflow friction and increase productivity in industries such as Smart Cities, Transportation, Logistics, and Healthcare.
Michael serves at the Chief Revenue Officer for NTENT, responsible for all sales, marketing, customer support and revenue generation. For more than 20 years’, Michael has led mobile and digital growth and strategy operations in the telecom marketplace. He co-founded and led digital/ad tech startups including Sundial.com and Pinsight Media, a subsidiary of Sprint. He previously served as VP of Business Development for Neustar and VP of Digital at Sprint Nextel, with additional management roles at Fortune 500 companies like Motorola and Deloitte Consulting.
Mitul Tiwari is the CTO and Co-founder of Passage.AI. His expertise lies in building data-driven products using AI, Machine Learning and big data technologies. Previously he was head of People You May Know and Growth Relevance at LinkedIn, where he led technical innovations in large-scale social recommender systems. Prior to that, he worked at Kosmix (now Walmart Labs) on web-scale document and query categorization, and its applications. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has also co-authored more than twenty publications in top conferences such as KDD, WWW, RecSys, VLDB, SIGIR, CIKM, and SPAA.
Dr. Nagendra Kumar Goel is the CEO of GoVivace Inc. that develops speech technology for call analytics, transcription, dictation, IVR and voice biometrics. He has been leading the effort on identifying speaker characteristics that can be used for emotionally intelligent dialogue. He has authored eight patents and several conference and journal publications. He received his Ph.D. from the Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to founding GoVivace, he worked worked on speech technology at various organizations, such as Mocrosoft, Entropic Inc., LSI Logic, Apptek and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Nara Kasbergen is a senior software engineer at NPR (National Public Radio), where she is the technical lead for emerging platforms. Her cross-functional team of developers, designers, product owners, agile project managers, and a QA specialist has designed and delivered voice-first experiences such as the "Play NPR" integration for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, an NPR One skill for Alexa, a visual newscast for multi-modal voice interfaces, and many more exciting projects still in the pipeline. She also regularly presents on the implementation, technical strategy, and ethics of voice platform development at conferences and meetups around the world.
Neha Javalagi is a Product Lead at Witlingo. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from Maharashtra Institute of Technology, where she graduated with distinction. In addition to being a developer and an active builder of Alexa skills, Neha is also passionate about using user-centric design thinking for creative problem solving with the context of voice experiences. With her background in software design, interaction design and creative writing, she believes that conversational interaction design lies at the intersection of her passion and purpose. When she’s not design thinking, you’ll find her always thinking about design.
For the last six years, I’ve lead the design team responsible for voice UX across physical and digital interfaces for Comcast. Prior to that, my work at frog design delivered innovative experiences for companies like GE, Disney and Honeywell. passionate about visual design while recognizing the connection between interaction and technology. I have an ambitious and yet realistic vision of what it takes to bring ideas to market, as well as what boundaries to push to foster new ideas. I am equally fascinated with good design and good gadgetry. Passionate about physical design, the digital design and the environments they foster and create.
Passionate about a voice-first future, Nick develops Alexa Skills and Google Actions through his company, Invoked Apps. Nick’s company is best known as the first author of ambient sounds for sleep and relaxation on Alexa and Google Assistant, reaching over 2 million customers every month. Aside from helping people get a good night’s rest, Nick also created “Opening Bell,” the first open-source Alexa Skill capable of looking up U.S. stock prices using spoken company names.
Nick is recognized as an Amazon Alexa Champion and Google Developer Expert for his continuous contributions in the voice-first community.
Nico Acosta is a Director of Product and Engineering for Twilio AI. Prior to Twilio, Nico was an entrepreneur in the mobile space. Nico has lived in Bogota, London, Chicago, and currently lives in San Francisco. He holds a degree in Computer Science from La Universidad de Los Andes and an MBA from Kellogg.
Nicolas leads the product design team at Potato, a digital product studio based in the US and the UK. Potato design, build and launch groundbreaking digital products and services. Their clients include Google, Mozilla and the BBC. At Potato, Nicolas has led Cannes Lion and Clio award winning voice projects for gaming clients. He has been featured talking about voice technology in Venture Beat, Advertising Week and .NET magazine. Prior to Potato, Nicolas worked at start-ups in both advertising and legal sectors on projects such as augmented reality and AI applications.
With over 25 years' experience in both Law and Technology Nigel has a unique perspective as both a client and a user. Nigel's vision of what speech could be was the foundation for Intelligent Voice and his drive and passion for progression has proven infectious. Engaging and insightful, Nigel's knowledge of the industry comes across in his talks. As a regular presenter for NVIDIA at GTC summits as well as part of the Innovation series events, most recently with HPE and IBM, Nigel has proven himself a capable and informative speaker.
Nik Bhattacharya is the Co Founder & CEO of Convessa, a deep-tech company focused on voice as the future of workplace computing. Nik previously co-founded Hit Wicket, an agency focusing on radical innovation. He has 20 years of experience in the software industry. Nik has degrees in Finance from Wharton Business School and Computer Science Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to being a deep expert in mobile technologies, since 2012, Nik has founded two software companies along with his business partner and co founder Dan McCafferty. Nik also has a very keen design-mind and is a big believer in developing user experiences that are extraordinary. During his 6 years at frog design, one of the world's leading innovation firms, he was a principal software architect working with product designers to create some of the world's most cutting-edge innovations.
Paul-Louis Nech is a R&D Engineer at Algolia, where he develops tools for Android developers. He currently focuses on the intersection of mobile platforms, search engines & conversational interfaces… Which you can tell from hearing him utter weird sentences to hand-held devices and debating STT's handling of regional accents.
A developer of voice conversations for the last 14 years, and leading teams at both small and large organizations. Over this period, Pete has developed voice solutions for many popular brands to provide customer care and self service. He's also created helpful voice skills for both Amazon and Google. Most recently, Pete is was a finalist at Samsung's Developer Showcase where he showed off a Bixby assistant that would perform personalized voice search for an online store. Now, he's advising brands to get them onto the Bixby platform. You can find out more information on his personal site: http://petehaas.com or his voice agency: http://conversationcurve.com
With over 10+ years experience leading companies in both software and hardware (IoT), Peter has a passion for crafting new user experiences surrounding emerging technologies. Peter is an avid entrepreneur holding equity in several startup companies in the Orlando area. He is also a founder and partner of Six Fold Ventures, a startup venture capital firm focused on developing emerging technology companies in the AI (artificial intelligence), VR/AR and Blockchain space.
Peter's first career was in electronics, which was followed by building a company from zero to 400 staff, and a successful IPO. Not only was Peter chief designer of the company’s comprehensive ERP suite, he also designed the system’s 4th generation database and custom programming language. Peter also has a keen interest in cognitive science and the inter-relationship between philosophy, psychology, ethics and computer science. Since the early 90's he has been researching AGI (artificial general intelligence), and in 2001 started Adaptive A.I. Inc., with the express goal of developing this technology. In 2008 Peter founded SmartAction.ai, which offers the only call automation solution powered by a (proto) AGI engine. He now heads up Aigo.ai Inc., which has developed and is commercializing an advanced conversational general-purpose personal assistant. Peter often writes and presents on various philosophical topics including rational ethics, freewill and artificial minds; and is deeply involved with futurism and radical life-extension.
Steve is the founder, and chief dabbler at Dabble Lab, a private technology R&D company. Dabble Lab is best known in the voice community for SkillTemplates.com a free repository of code templates for building Alexa skills, and for the Dabble Lab YouTube channel which provides over 150 free video tutorials to help developers quickly learn how to build solutions for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Samsung Bixby, and Twilio Autopilot. Prior to Dabble Lab, Steve founded enthusem.com, an award-winning marketing automation company which he sold in 2014. Prior to enthusem.com, Steve founded and exited from Prospect Links which became part of Ricoh (TYO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange), and Member Logics which became part of J2 Global (JCOMM on NASDAQ).
Stuart R. Patterson is the cofounder and CEO of LifePod Solutions, a pioneer in the provision of voice-first Virtual Caregivers offering professional and personal caregivers the ability to configure 2-way voice dialogs to monitor and support those in need of care. Stu has led early-stage ventures in a variety of markets including: voice/virtual assistants and caregivers, speech recognition/synthesis, mobile apps and services, video content and identity management, clean-tech, and digital healthcare solutions. As CEO/COO and advisor, Stu has managed and supported the growth, IPO or sale of: Sidekicks, Ramp (acq. by Cxense), Xtone, SunBug Solar, Nexamp, eQuilibrium (acq. by EnerNOC), AgION (now Sciessent), Courion, Scansoft (now Nuance), SpeechWorks (IPO), Voxware (IPO) and Vicorp Interactive Systems. He holds a BA from Harvard College and an MBA from the Yale School of Management.
Susan is a persistent advocate for user-centric design and has deep experience in linguistics, voice interaction design, and speech technologies. She has built multidisciplinary teams in industry and academia and holds a Doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. Susan was Program Chair of the SpeechTEK Conference (2007-2016) and was the founding President of the Association of Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD). She enjoys speaking and writing about conversational user experiences and currently serves as CEO of Banter Technology.
Susan Westwater is a senior strategist who uses customer-centric approaches and content strategy skill sets to achieve business growth. Passionate about customer experience, she is experienced in managing global, national and regional product launches and content initiatives across large organizations. She also is a part of Women in Voice Leadership. Susan and Scot co-founded Pragmatic, an experience consultancy who helps clients navigate the modern digital landscape to develop solutions that are relevant to clients’ customers and business.
Thibault Duchemin grew up the only hearing person in a deaf family, interpreting for them since age 5. After a double master's degree in Artificial Intelligence in Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and UC Berkeley, he founded Ava to make the every day life of 450 million deaf & hard-of-hearing people 24/7 accessible, by building the fastest AI captioner for conversations. Today, Ava enables social and professional inclusion, making communications also accessible in the world's largest companies, schools, conferences, and museums. Thibault is part of the board of trustees of the Hearing Loss Association of America, is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and was named Humanitarian of 2017 and Innovator Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review.
Tim is co-founder of 169 Labs in Munich and Cologne, one of the leading german voice assistant agencies. With expertise in UX / UI design and several years of conversational design experience he is now responsible for the conception, design and marketing of voice applications. Tim is also one of 38 Alexa Champions worldwide.
Tom Doyle brings over 30 years of experience in operational excellence and executive leadership in analog and mixed-signal semiconductor technology to Aspinity. Prior to Aspinity, Tom was group director of Cadence Design Systems’ analog and mixed-signal IC business unit, where he managed the deployment of the company’s technology to the world’s foremost semiconductor companies. Previously, Tom was founder and president of the analog/mixed-signal software firm, Paragon IC solutions, where he was responsible for all operational facets of the company including sales and marketing, global partners/distributors, and engineering teams in the US and Asia. Tom holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from West Virginia University and an MBA from California State University, Long Beach.
Valerie Vacante Founder, Managing Partner, Collabsco Valerie Vacante is the Founder of Collabsco, a strategy and innovation firm based in Austin, Texas. In a connected world of entertainment, play, living and learning Valerie has pioneered digital products and experiences across IoT, AR, VR and beyond. Valerie launched the first-ever connected play landscape, mapping 115+ connected play experiences, emerging technologies and business growth opportunities. She expanded Collabsco’s innovation efforts across the US, Europe and South America helping companies build their portfolios through collaborations with inventors, startups and global brands. Valerie is also the Co-Founder of TechUp, a curated service that showcases innovative products on a global stage. In between driving what’s next in technology, culture and design, Valerie serves on the SXSW Innovation Advisory Board, CES KAPi Awards Judge, Global Mentor to MassChallenge, International Speaker and Writer. You can find her almost anywhere creators are designing the future.
Waleed currently heads a technology innovation lab, VirtualForce.io, that incubates next generation technology products and digital innovations. His team is aimed at solving complex business problems through deep tech and digital transformation in areas like Healthcare, VOICE, AI/ML, FinTech and Blockchain. Waleed got his MBA from Yale University, and studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
Wesley leads BNY Mellon Pershing's voice and larger conversational AI strategy. He's a veteran of the New York startup scene, where he helped to build the brain (and the team) behind x.ai's Amy and later founded the voice computing startup John Done. He lives in the NYC suburbs with his wife, two daughters, and a dog of highly-questionable pedigree.
Will Hall is the Chief Creative Officer at RAIN, leading combined teams of strategists, engineers, and designers. He serves on multiple advisory boards, and has been declared the "winner" of Pinterest. Over the past 15 years, he's worked at agencies with key clients including Amazon, Adobe, Facebook, Sony, Adult Swim, Nike and others. He is also an adjunct professor of Design and Technology at NYU.
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Will Mayo founded SpokenLayer to power media and brands on voice platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Media clients include Oath, Gannett, McClatchy, Hearst, GateHouse Media, Medium, A+E, LinkedIn, and hundreds more. Brand clients include TD Ameritrade, Bose, and the Salvation Army. SpokenLayer is backed by visionary investors like The Guardian, Matter, Betaworks, Graham Holdings, and North Base Media. Prior to starting SpokenLayer, Will worked at Goldman Sachs and Intel and earned a masters in Computer Engineering and Ergonomics from Lehigh University.
Zachary Haynes is Director of Global Business Development of the Dictionaries Division at Oxford University Press, responsible for Oxford’s Global Language Solutions and "Powered by Oxford", a licensing service that aggregates the world’s best foreign language data in partnership with innovative platforms, products and services. He is also the business lead for the Oxford Dictionaries API. Zachary holds a degree from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
I'm a young Afro-Caribbean millennial who's always had an affinity for solving problems and using cross-cultured experiences to do it. From studying Ethnomusicology to starting my own greeting card business, now as a User Experience Designer @ Deloitte Digital, my thought process has grown to be very unique to understanding and aligning with people’s culture, emotions, and ideologies. With focuses such as multicultural design and accessibility, I help entrepreneurs and companies to redesign their digital and physical user experiences. When I'm not doing UX, I spend time with my family, my dog, tinkering with new ideas as well as volunteers my time with multiple non-profit organizations.
Currently, Adam Cheyer is co-Founder and VP Engineering of Viv Labs, a startup simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything. Viv Labs was acquired by Samsung in 2016. Previously, Adam Cheyer was co-Founder and VP Engineering at Siri, Inc., a company aimed at fundamentally redesigning the face of the consumer mobile experience. In 2010, Siri was acquired by Apple, where Mr. Cheyer became a Director of Engineering in the iPhone/iOS group. Mr. Cheyer is also a Founding Member and Advisor to Change.org, the premier social network for positive social change, and a co-Founder of Sentient Technologies.
Philipp is a seasoned automotive industry expert. He was the Founder and CEO at S1NN GmbH (acquired by Harman International) and instrumental with in-car audio and connectivity, delivering a highly sophisticated infotainment systems to automotive customers; Audi, Bentley, Porsche and Tesla. Prior to joining CloudCar, Philipp also held Executive level positions in TradeBeam, Harman/Becker, and Bose. Philipp holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration from the Technical University Berlin.
Phoebe is a voice specialist with a background in audio engineering and audio branding. With her expertise, she helps brands prepare for a sound and voice-activated future.
Raika designs meaningful products, services and experiences for both people and businesses. Inspired by the future and what could be, Raika found her home at Moonshot where through a user-centered and empathic design process, she seeks to create next-generation user experiences in voice. Partnering with brands to embrace new technologies and build authentic relationships with their customers. Raika’s expertise includes voice, chatbots, responsive sites, iOS and android apps, digital-out-of-home, and store of the future experiences for industries including Retail, Logistics, Food Services, Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Human Resources, Publishing, and Automotive both in the US and European markets.
?????Rainer is a serial entrepreneur working in the Music & Tech space since 1996. Raised in Wolfsburg, he studied Administration Science in Constance, Hamburg and London. Rainer is the founder and CEO of laut.ag, publisher of laut.de - the most popular german music magazine - and laut.fm - the largest online radio platform in Germany. Rainer is a vice-chairman of the Focus-Group Audio in the Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW). He is a dedicated programmer of his own online music radio station on laut.fm/rnr.
Dr Rand Hindi (@randhindi) is an entrepreneur and data scientist. He is the CEO at Snips, the first decentralized, private by design voice assistant. Rand started coding at the age of 10, founded a Social Network at 14 and a web agency at 15 before getting into Machine Learning at 18 and starting a PhD at 21. He has been elected as a TR35 by the MIT Technology Review, as a "30 under 30" by Forbes, and is a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris. He was previously a member of the French Digital Council where he focused on AI and Privacy issues. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London (UCL), as well as two graduate degrees from Singularity University in Silicon Valley and THNK in Amsterdam.
Richard is co-founder of Send Me a Sample, the world’s first voice first brand activation platform. Send me a Sample (SMaS) is the world’s first and only voice platform that allows brands to deliver product sampling direct into consumer’s homes. It offers brands more effective targeting, zero risk and wastage for product trial, but also downstream purchase funnel conversion ongoing customer relationship building. SMaS launched in September 2018 in the UK and has received a huge amount of interest from major brands. By the end of the year we had completed more than 10 campaigns for clients Coca Cola, Diageo, John Frieda, Kind Snacks, King of Shaves and L’Oreal. Send Me a Sample is currently available in UK, USA and Germany but aims to be available in all major voice markets.
Rob Bennett is CEO of rehab, a leading creative technology company that specializes in delivering 1:1 consumer experiences for brands. Headquartered in London, with offices in New York City, Warsaw and Los Angeles, Rehab delivers emerging technology solutions and services across multiple disciplines including strategy, creative, user experience (UX), design, creative technology and development. Rob’s fresh outlook has been published in the likes of AdWeek, The Drum and Real Business. From Emmy award-winning work with HBO, to creating first-of-its-kind AI experiences with Google, rehab is ahead of the curve. The agency also counts Nike and Estée Lauder among its clients, helping them make people’s day-to-day lives that little bit easier. Alongside this, following recent research on how being in a good mood can affect how well the flu vaccine protects you, rehab has partnered with the University of Nottingham to develop a digital intervention tool designed to affect mood and create a positive state of mind, with the goal of ensuring treatment is more effective and, in turn, saving the NHS money. Rob’s unique and varied experience has made him a passionate advocate of moving beyond the status quo of conventional advertising. Alongside this, his in-depth knowledge on how to best adapt and make use of the opportunities offered by AI, voice and machine learning means that he can offer vital insight into how these interactions have the potential to transform the lives of consumers and reach a whole new level of user-first engagement that provides true value to the individual.
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Roger Kibbe is a developer evangelist for Viv Labs, the engine behind Samsung’s Bixby 2.0. As a developer evangelist, Roger gets developers excited about building amazing new conversational AI experiences. Roger has over 20 years of experience leveraging technology for strategic business advantage. Prior to Viv Labs, Roger founded both a voice product startup and voice consulting firm. Prior to that, Roger spent many years leading Omnichannel technology strategy for Gap Inc and has many years of technology consulting experience. Roger has a degree from UC Berkeley.
A career of almost 20 years in the service of corporate communication, in the Publicis group and in integrated communication services, I now work as a freelance, with companies and agencies for consulting and consulting operational support with a strong expertise in conversational interfaces. I am also currently working on the creation of a new company - Urban Voice - specialized in the creation of multimodal voice experiences for the smart city. The skill "Mes Déchets à Rueil" (My waste in Rueil) is the first achievement signed by Urban Voice, a proof of concept incubated by Rueil Digital (an association leading the digital transformation in the city of Rueil Malmaison, Paris Area). We are now in discussion with other french cities to make local adaptations of this skill and create other voice apps for smart cities (in other areas than waste). I am also a member of the early leadership team @womeninvoice and teacher "Voice and Digital" for students of Digital Marketing and Business at EFAP (French communication school - campus also in NY) in France (Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille).
Sanjay is the Director of Launch – Emerson College’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. In this capacity, he is focused on fostering entrepreneurship among students and on infusing innovation into the larger college. As a part of this vision, he is helping to position Emerson College as the leader in next-generation marketing communications. Prior to academia, Sanjay spent a decade on Madison Avenue – founding an early mobile marketing agency, running the mobile unit for Publicis in the U.S., and running an ad-tech DSP / DMP. Previously, Sanjay spent over a decade in management consulting advising telecommunications, media, and high technology firms on strategy, operations and IT issues. Sanjay began his career in finance and accounting at IBM. Sanjay has served as a featured speaker and panelist at industry trade and media events such as AdTech, Digital Hollywood, and OMMA as well as at various client summits. He has also been an adjunct research associate at the Harvard Business School where he authored papers and cases and helped develop a course on Internet business models. Sanjay received his B.S. at the University of California at Berkeley and his M.B.A. at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Sanjeev is originally from the Pacific Northwest and taught himself how to program computers in the late 1970’s at the age of 12. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Willamette University and has been in the software industry for over 30 years. Highlights of his career include working for Microsoft as a lead developer on Windows 2000 and Windows XP and writing an initial POC for a software product that eventually became MSN Messenger. Sanjeev also co-architected (and wrote helper C libraries for) the first real world implementation of Windows PCs automatically authenticating through Internet Explorer to Apache Web Servers using Kerberos. Prior to founding Whetstone Technologies, Sanjeev was CTO of Proscape Technologies.
Sarah Storm (she/her) is the Vice President of Smart Speaker Content at John Marshall Media. She is a multi-modal storyteller, coach, and strategist who pairs her extensive experience in the performing arts world with expertise in crafting and facilitating great Voice-First experiences. She’s proud to have contributed her thoughts to the audiobook This Week In Voice Presents: Perspectives On Gender In #VoiceFirst Technology. Sarah lives in Brooklyn with her spouse.
Sascha is a professional developer and user experience enthusiast. His true passion is to improve the human-computer interaction: He loves to build conversational and multimodal experiences with text and voice. Sascha works as a consultant, speaker, and author who focusses on understanding, innovation, and value. As such he is committed to the interests of all kinds of developers and users. He is board member of the Usability & User Experience working group at the federal association BITKOM. Furthermore, he is Google Developer Expert and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. Before he joined the Conversational AI Platform Company Cognigy, he worked at Deutsche Telekom and as Senior Technology Evangelist for Alexa at Amazon.
I'm an international EdTech Entrepreneur with businesses operating in the UK, USA and Poland. For the last 15 years I've bootstrapped my core business Webanywhere and in the last 3 years I set up Ventures Anywhere as my start up vehicle. Ventures Anywhere is the owner of Sound Branch a multi-modal voice messaging platform which works on the web, iOS, Android and Google Assistant. Sound Branch is disruptive as it allows for "Massive Voice Only Online Conversations". In the general puiblic this can help democratize radio and encourage free speech and debate. For internal comms Sound Branch brings about a more personable way to communicate. Sound Branch is the platform for nanocasting where you say it in 10 seconds. You start with a 10 second seed and then you and others get branching to build a beanstalk!
Proud father and husband, Keynote speaker, philosopher. Executive Director of Commercialization at NJIT University. Previously served 12 years as Chairman and CEO of Wayside Technology Group, (NASDAQ: “WSTG”). Started career at Ernst & Young in Amsterdam, Holland. A graduate of the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School, I also serve on the board for the New Jersey Technology Council (NJTC) (Chairman of the board 2007- 2015). Received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® 2011 Award in the Technology Services Category. Black belt in Taekwondo, I ran a lot of marathons and some ultra-marathons; longest running race completed was a 100KM race.
Stas Tushinskiy is CEO and co-founder of Instreamatic.ai, an adtech platform headquartered in San Francisco. Prior to Instreamatic.ai, Stas built a leading digital audio advertising sales house in Europe, working closely with global Tier 1 brands like Porsche, Starbucks, and McDonald’s, as well as global ad agencies including OMD and Mindshare. Before that, Stas headed business development for a leading mobile music streaming service in Europe. Stas, his wife, and his son make their home in Mountain View, California.
Stefanie Fail is the Global Lead for Conversation Experience Design at Nuance Communications. She has over 12 years of experience designing conversational voice AI interfaces for some of the largest US and Global enterprises. Stefanie holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from The New School for Social Research in New York City, where her research focused on psycholinguistics, human-computer interaction and survey research methodology.
Stephanie is a UX / Voice UI Designer & Entrepreneur. She is the Founder CEO of Design Voice a company that makes voice-first experiences in English and Spanish. She loves technology and the creation of user experiences. She has been co-founder of 3 startups and winner of multiple technology and innovation contests. Designing with purpose is her main goal in order to create amazing experiences.
Amplifi Media guides companies in the development of podcast and smart speaker strategies. Clients including ABC News, Trader Joe's (top "branded" podcast) Dave Ramsey (3rd largest radio show, 5th largest podcast), Beasley Media Group, Spoken Layer (smart speaker content for publishers including The Daily Beast, Los Angeles times, Gatehouse Media, Politio and Gannett), Drive Time Metrics (measuring audo consumption in vehicles)and others. Steve was a co-founder and EVP of Saga Communications which grew to over 100 radio stations and trades on the NYSE. He is Co-Founder of Sonic Ai, which provides content strategy and development for smart speaker initiatives and is a frequent speaker about on-demand audio and smart speakers.
Steven Kuyan is managing director of the NYU Tandon Future Labs – a network of business incubators and accelerators that support early stage ventures in New York City. The Future Labs support entrepreneurs in technology-specific fields, such as: artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented/virtual reality, video and virtual machines, among others. To date, the unique process has graduated 97 companies – 18 as acquisitions totaling more than $700 million – for a combined valuation of graduates exceeding $1.5B billion. Furthermore, the companies graduating from the Future Labs have helped contribute to a $4 billion impact for NYC. Steven co-founded the Future Labs while serving as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at NYU – his alma matter and the institution where he continues to teach. Prior to launching the Future Labs, Steven founded and co-founded three ventures in mobile, B2B logistics, and retail. He currently oversees management of the Data Future Lab, Digital Future Lab, Veterans Future Lab and the AI NexusLab – the first program in the U.S. designed specifically for early stage artificial intelligence startups.
Anders Brown is a passionate business leader with a focus on growing new businesses at the intersection of software, hardware and media. He has a broad range of sales, marketing, engineering and operational experience across US, Asia and Europe, including a wide range of work with corporate financing such as acquisitions, joint ventures and IPOs.
Andreea Danielescu, Founder of Antilipsi and Head of Engineering at CivitasAI, has spent the past decade working in voice assistants, chatbots, augmented reality and gestural interfaces. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from University of Arizona and a PhD from Arizona State University. Previously, she worked as a Partner Engineer for Facebook Messenger and on Intel Real Speech, overseeing the design and development of a conversational coaching product for running and cycling in partnership with Oakley.
Ben Parkison is a passionate believer in the future of voice and natural language interactions with enterprise systems. As Vice President, Sales at Valence, Mr. Parkison has the benefit of speaking with customers worldwide about their digital transformation needs and opportunities. As part of this experience, he has led the design and development of the voice and chatbot strategy at Valence and is excited to share his views in support of the industry’s enterprise voice movement.
Giles is the CMO of a 100+ person tech startup trying to change the world for the better by addressing it all with just 3 words. Giles was the fifth employee at what was then a budding startup and created the vision, positioning, identity and go-to marketing strategy for the company. He built a team made up of creatives and strategists across accounts and production all while redesigning the service, app, site, identity of the company and working closely with customers to promote partnerships. By carefully blending tech for good and commercial messaging, he has taken what3words from a quirky idea to a globally recognized brand used by organizations (including Airbnb, Lonely Planet, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Dominos, and more), individuals and governments in over 170 countries.
Einat Is a voice user interface designer with a diverse background (Science, Art, Education, UX design). She created the Alexa skill, Kiwi Monsters, an interactive story that teaches kids about evolution. Her Alexa skills emphasizes sounds and human voices in order to produce an immersive experience for the users. Einat works on her Chatty Creations projects along with designing voice experiences for other companies.
Elaine is the Principal Product Designer for Twilio's conversational AI platform called Autopilot. Autopilot enables businesses to build and train smart conversational bots intuitively to deliver efficient customer experiences. Prior to Twilio, she lead design at eBay on their fully AI-powered shopping assistant that lived inside of Messenger and Google Assistant. And, lead design at a startup building an office assistant Slack bot with humans in the loop. Since then, she has spoken about designing for bots at conferences like SuperBot, Business of Bots, Talk UX, and multiple panel discussions. You can read more about her learnings and insight building AI bots on her Medium. Before her design career in conversational assistants and AI, she was an art director and product designer at agencies and startups in NYC.
Greg has spent the last 19 years defining, designing and building interactive experiences for clients like Starbucks, Walmart, Amazon, Campbell's and Yahoo. For the last 9 years at RAIN, Greg's has been assisting brands with the definition and development of tailored voice strategies, the creation of voice experiences (Alexa Skills & Google Assistant Actions), and exploring actionable approaches to Conversational AI. Prior to RAIN, Greg was a designer for Context Studio and King Features, a division of the Hearst Corporation. He also spent several years as part of the faculty at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University as a professor of design.
Helen Todd is Co-founder and CEO of Sociality Squared, a social media agency established in 2010 in New York City who understands the magic of people coming together around what they value and love. Helen is an award-winning marketer, international speaker, and also an advisor and speaker for SXSW Interactive. She graduated from Xavier University and holds a Master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Emerson College.
Holger Wiebe is head of the Entwicklungsredaktion (R&D Desk) at ZEIT ONLINE. With his team, he is responsible for the development of all editorially driven products. He is part of ZEIT ONLINE's strategic task force, responsible for exploration and development of voice and audio products. As Product Owner, he is also involved in projects such as the international platform for political dialogue "My Country Talks" or ZEIT ONLINE's own conference "Z2X". Since the late 1990s he has worked in various digital product development roles, both in advertising and media, successfully establishing several companies.
James Lyle is Director of the Custom Linguistic Solutions team at Appen. After earning his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Washington, James joined Microsoft in 1999 and spent more than 14 years working on various natural language technologies, including proofing tools, information extraction, and text analytics. Since joining Appen in 2013, he has focused on providing tech industry clients with linguistic consultation and high-quality annotated data for machine-learned NLU solutions
Arria NLG, Chief Operating Officer, Prior to joining Arria, Jay held key senior executive positions in global companies including: EMC, Documentum, Unisys, and Lockheed Martin. Jay has successfully led companies from growth phase through to post-acquisition integration. “Arria’s key technology links applications to humans in ways never before possible. Arria is in a key leadership position with its core NLG technology supported by key patents.”
Brielle Nickoloff is a Lead of Product Marketing at Witlingo, a Washington D.C., based startup that builds products and solutions for Voice First devices and platforms, including Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. Brielle earned dual Bachelor’s degrees in Linguistics and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of Brielle’s research in the space began with a closer look at the ways one’s emotional reaction to a voice interface is notably more inflated than reactions to other types of user interfaces. She loves to design for maximally accessible and minimally intrusive technology by leveraging the beauty of natural human language.
Charlie is engineering lead in the Potato San Francisco studio. He has successfully led and delivered many products with diverse technology stacks and has extensive experience with a variety of platforms. Charlie has helped deliver voice experiences for Activision and Bethesda, as well as winning a Cannes Lion for innovation.
Chris Geison is a Principal UX Researcher for emerging technologies at AnswerLab, where he leads research to help Fortune 500 clients create experiences that people love. Drawing from his background in digital strategy at Charles Schwab and behavioral counseling at a mental health facility, Chris' UX research practice is focused on distilling strategic insights from human interactions. He has presented his work on user research and voice user interfaces at multiple international conferences and to clients in a wide variety of industries. A graduate of Brown University, Chris lives in San Francisco with his wife, their daughter, and an imaginary panther named Winston.
Derek Holt is President & Chief Operating Officer of K4Connect, a mission-centered technology company focused on creating solutions that serve and empower older adults and individuals living with disabilities through the integration of latest technologies including smart home, smart wellness, social and voice. Previously, Holt was a member of the founding executive team at Startup America Partnership, a public-private partnership with the White House focused on accelerating entrepreneurship nationwide. Holt began his career at IBM and served as the Worldwide Program Director for Business Partners and General Business in the Rational Software Division. Throughout his 10-year career at IBM Holt served in various technical and business leadership roles, he was awarded multiple patents and worked with partners and customers in over 25 countries.
Dillan DiGiovanni is an integrative identity coach, writer and speaker who inspires self-awareness, cultural change and individual resilience through his writing, storytelling and keynotes. Dillan is a two-time TEDx speaker, has been featured on PBS and has spoken at companies like IDEO, Microsoft, General Assembly and he’s a Global Mentor for WeWork Labs. Dillan's expertise is the intersection of educational theory, diversity and identity development, behavioral change theory and integrative health. Dillan earned his B.S. in Education from The College of New Jersey and his MEd from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. He returned home to New Jersey after living in New England for 12 years. He runs on 80s music and coffee and needs to eat more greens. His favorite movie is The Karate Kid and he would definitely beat you in a lip-syncing contest.
Andrew Bellavia is the Dir. of Market Development for Knowles Corp, a leading acoustic solutions provider to the hearables, smart speaker, mobile, and IoT industries. He has been personally involved in supporting the development of many innovative hearable devices including Bragi, Doppler, Nuheara, and a number of others soon to be released. Andrew is also an advocate for the role technology can play in addressing hearing loss, and in the practical use cases for voice in the convergence between hearing aids and hearables. He earned a BSEE from the Illinois Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. When not in the office he can usually be found running the roads of N. Illinois and the world, often photographing as he goes. His last two speaking engagements on the topic of intelligent hearables were at the Acoustic Block conference in October 2018 and at the 52Audio conference in March, both in Shenzhen, China.
Tal Wenderow joined Beyond Verbal as President & CEO in Feb 2019. Tal is a seasoned healthcare executive with ample experience in developing and commercializing innovative & disruptive technologies. Before joining the company, Tal co-founded Corindus Vascular Robotics [NYSE:CVRS] and in his last position served as the Executive Vice President of International & Business Development responsible for global sales and business partnerships of Corindus. Tal holds a Bachelor of Science, Summa Cum Laude, in Mechanical Engineering from Technion in Israel and completed Executive Program for Life Sciences at the Merage Foundation, Merage Business School, University of California, Irvine, CA, having numerous patents issued based on his inventions.
Wes Gould is Partner and CTO of REDspace, a software company building the future of television, entertainment, and learning. Under Wes’ leadership, the company has grown to a team of over 200 technical engineers. As the digital tech partner to global entertainment brands, REDspace builds engaging voice and interactive solutions for clients such as Turner/Warner Media, Viacom, Sony Pictures Television, and Akamai. An industry leader, Wes serves as a Member of the Television Academy and regularly speaks at conferences and events around the world.
Michelle Levine is a Senior Business Development Manager at Amazon, where she has worked for 8 years. She accelerates the Alexa business by building relationships and connecting-the-dots with traditional and digital advertising agencies, consultants, innovators, tool creators, global holding companies, and developers around the world. Michelle is fostering a network and global community of partners who can build engaging content across voice-enabled devices
Sage Wohns is the cofounder and CEO of Agolo, a CRV and Microsoft backed company that uses artificial intelligence to summarize information faster, and with better coverage, than any person in the world. Sage believes that if we can responsibly apply the capabilities of AI, it can empower us toward insight and ingenuity of which only the human mind is capable.
After completing his MBA at Columbia Business School and leading Multilingual Engineering at Rakuten in Tokyo, Sage enjoyed a brief stint farming radish in the countryside of Hokkaido before returning home to pioneer the AI-startup boom in New York City. He blended his programming and business-strategy experience to launch Agolo, which has since become a trailblazer for the mainstream use of AI in finance and news organizations, and the winner of Citi’s Top Business Intelligence Tool prize .
Besides being a proud nerd and Seattle native, Sage is also an accomplished cellist, fluent Japanese speaker, and avid mountaineer. Don’t get him started on comic books.
Scot has been working in the fields of design, user experience and digital strategy for the past 20 years.
During his career, he has seen the advent of web, mobile and now Voice. He uses this knowledge to help clients create relevant and useful applications of existing and emerging technologies to enhance their overall customer experiences.
Scot has worked with a range of clients across a variety industries, most notably healthcare and consumer package goods.
Jessica Hall is VP of Product Strategy and Design at 3Pillar Global, and author of "The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks" (available fall 2019). 3Pillar Global is an Inc. 5000 developer of client-facing web and mobile applications. Jessica leads teams creating digital products that customers crave and that drive business growth. With wide ranging experience, she’s passionate about helping clients succeed.
Jessica has scaled MDC Ventures into a global operation spanning the entire MDC network, evaluating hundreds of early stage companies a year while educating partners on the emerging trends driving the industry. Via the MDC Ventures advisor network, Jessica has created a powerful micro community driving cross pollination of innovation insights across more than 15 agencies. She’s sourced and lead investments in emerging companies including Msg.ai, Gradient.io, Veritonic, Catch & Release and Mezzobit (acquired by OpenX).
Jim co-founded Sonde Health to focus on extending vocal biomarker analysis technology to give today’s voice assistants disruptive capabilities to measure health directly and proactively across a range of mental and physical health conditions. He has over 25 years of experience harnessing innovative technologies to provide solutions to important biological measurement needs. Beginning at MIT and MIT Lincoln Laboratory and continuing at PureTech Health, he has helped build teams and solutions impacting a broad range of applications including biodefense, human DNA identification and characterization, and distributed human health and performance monitoring.
Joti Balani is managing director of Freshriver.ai which focuses on building custom, human-centered enterprise grade bots that generate economic and brand value while being emotionally intelligent. She has helped B2B and B2C enterprises build data-driven, CX-focused product portfolios leveraging conversational AI, mobile and cloud services. She combines her multi-disciplinary expertise in product development, software engineering and marketing to create outcome focused enterprise capabilities. She has led product and technology innovation at both startup and Fortune 1000 enterprises including AT&T, American Red Cross, Texas Instruments, Zayo group, Medocity, Anexinet and Cross River Fiber. She also founded the Sisters Circle, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women and children with education and opportunity. She has an MBA from University of Dallas and B.Sc. Computer Science from University of Bahrain, Arabian Gulf. You can reach her at www.linkedin.com/in/jotibalani.
An award winning composer, he co-created the long running “America’s First Family” theme, and is a two time Emmy nominee for original music composition for NBC’s Today show. He is an Emmy Nominee for Best Promotional Announcement on MSNBC, and is honoured by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for his contributions to NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
Matt Ware's been around digital a long time; back before the Y2K bug was even a thing. Prior to becoming Head of Operations at First, Matt helped realise the value of digital at Sensis, News Ltd, Reed Business Information and Dynamic Creative.
Over the last 20 years Matt has worked in the fields of SEO, Performance Media, Social, Mobile and CRO with a specific focus on how to improve Customer Experience and Engagement using Data and Analytics.
Most recently Matt has started to explore the value of AI, Machine Learning and how Voice enabled devices can be used to interact with customers in real time to answer their questions and needs.
Some of the clients Matt has worked with include: Kmart, Target, Suncorp, AAMI, Officeworks, Flight Centre, Fairfax, TradeMe, BigW, Fiji Airways, UNSW, Dymocks, Grays Online, TAB and Qantas to name just a few.
Matt's relentless pursuit to know his clients and their competitors inside and out places him in a unique position to bring vital insight to First's clients.
Frank J. Radice is an Emmy winning Journalist, Producer/Director, Musician, Author, and Media/Marketing Executive.
He is the managing partner of the consulting firms, VIDA F.R. Co. in NYC, and BadCatCo in London, the Expert in Residence for Definition6 and Vixen Labs, and London bureau chief, Salon Media. He’s on the advisory boards of Digital Hollywood and Observatory Pictures.
Frank is the former President and CMO of NATAS (The Emmy Awards), EVP the NBC Agency, the former Chair of the Promax BDA UK Conference and Awards, and consultant to Univision Communications in house marketing and promotion agencies, and the El Rey Network.
As a marketing executive for more than 20 years, Frank received the TV Week Magazine "Campaign of Distinction" award, was inducted into the PROMAX/BDA Hall of Fame, and named Brand Builder of the Year by Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable.
An award winning composer, he co-created the long running “America’s First Family” theme, and is a two time Emmy nominee for original music composition for NBC’s Today show. He is an Emmy Nominee for Best Promotional Announcement on MSNBC, and is honoured by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for his contributions to NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
In addition to extensive experience in advertising, promotion, and music, Frank has a lengthy background in journalism. During his 17 years with ABC News, he was honoured with 2 DuPont Awards and 2 national Emmy Awards. He was a producer for “Nightline," "Good Morning America," “ABC World News Tonight,” and “The Last Word with Phil Donahue and Greg Jackson,” and senior producer, product development, ABC News Interactive, and Executive Producer Of Entertainment News for CNN.
Frank and wife, Vida, co-wrote "Sam Katz on the Loose." a pop-up children's book illustrated by Charles Fazzino published by Random House.
He can be seen regularly on the global speakers circuit and on TechCrunchTV's "Gillmor Gang," and his music can be heard daily on “SalonTV”
Sara MacSween has enjoyed a diverse career in marketing and sales. She has done every type of marketing expect for holding a sign on the street. She has worked in over 30 industries across four countries. Her marketing consultancy just celebrated its 12 birthday. She is currently a Lecturer in the Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Hospitality and Tourism Department in the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNC Greensboro. Sara uses a variety of hands-on learning activities with her students. She holds degrees in journalism and history from UNC Chapel Hill. She earned her MBA from the University of Strathclyde and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include consumer behavior, motivation and sales agility.
Dr. Kondabolu is a practicing Orthopaedic Surgeon and the Co-Founder/CEO of Medicine ReMixed, a media company and creative agency focused on podcasting and voice technology in Healthcare. He served as a consultant for Anchor FM, a startup recently acquired by Spotify. Medicine ReMixed was named to The Best Podcasts list in 2018 by Anchor. Dr. Kondabolu is currently a Media consultant for Orthobullets, an online platform for Orthopaedic Surgery education. He created a Top 10 iTunes Education Podcast called “The Orthobullets Podcast.” His current projects include patient education applications for voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. He has been interviewed by Wired magazine, featured in TechCrunch and other technology blogs for his work in podcasting.
Zohar is the CEO and Co-founder of Wibbitz, the automated video creation company trusted by leading brands, publishers, and agencies. Before founding Wibbitz in 2011, Zohar’s entrepreneurial drive lead him to launch several startups at a young age. His passion for media and advanced technology has helped to pioneer the use of automation and change the digital video landscape. He speaks frequently at events such as the TEDx, World News Media Congress, and SXSW. Zohar was selected by Geektime as one of the Top 5 Israeli Entrepreneurs for 2013, the 40-under-40 list for 2014 by TheMarker Magazine, and the 2018 40-under-40 list for the Young Jewish Professionals organization.
Emily Sappington is the Product Design Manager for Voice & Conversational UI at Babylon Health. Previously she served as VP of Product at London-based AI startup, Context Scout. Emily has spent the bulk of her career in the United States designing Cortana for Microsoft across devices, particularly Natural Language & UI interactions with the assistant. Emily is a lecturer, US patent-holder, career coach for Ada School (the National College for Digital Skills in the UK), and is a recipient of an Exceptional Talent Visa from the UK Government and Tech Nation.
Theodora (Theo) Lau is speaker, writer, and advisor, whose work seeks to spark innovation to improve consumer financial well-being and health. As founder of Unconventional Ventures, she focuses on developing and growing an ecosystem of financial institutions, corporates, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to better address the unmet needs of consumers (e.g. older adults), with keen interests in women and minority founders. As part of her work, she regularly mentors and advises FinTech startups; she is also recognized as LinkedIn Top Voice for Economy and Finance, and Top FinTech influencer by various publications including Onalytica, Retail Banker International, and FinTech Finance. She co-hosts Rhetoriq, a podcast on longevity and fintech, and runs a weekly blog on Irish Tech News. She is a frequent contributing writer and speaker for top industry publications and conferences.
Vineet Sinha drives Salesforce's initiatives to push and explore boundaries for emerging technologies. In this role, Vineet's work involves making voice-enabled devices to have sophisticated conversations with users and using vision tracking to trigger better user experiences. Previously he has started multiple companies and has led efforts for building smart users interfaces around large data sources. Vineet has a PhD from the CS+AI Lab at MIT focusing on these challenges.
Dr. Joel Park is a board-certified emergency medicine physician with expertise in data science and machine learning in the healthcare sector. He is a Clinician – Data Scientist at Chainhaus and a practicing attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital - Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Park earned his medical degree at Rutgers University – New Jersey Medical School and completed his residency at New York Presbyterian – Universities of Columbia and Cornell. Dr. Park’s responsibilities include utilizing data science and machine learning algorithms for operational and clinical data with the goals of implementing changes from data insight. He performs exploratory data analysis and predictive modeling for emergency medicine department operations including work on patient boarding, surge protocols, and ED metrics.
Ha-Hoa Hamano is the Senior Product Manager of Emerging Platforms at NPR. In her role, Ha-Hoa evaluates new business opportunities for delivering NPR content on digital experiences via large screens, wearables, connected cars, voice assistants, and other emerging devices. She leads a cross-functional team to support a ubiquitous, personalized listening experience to meet NPR listeners wherever they are.
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