Michael Bergelson
Director of Business Development, Cisco Systems

Mike Bergelson was president and cofounder of Audium, which was acquired by Cisco. Under his leadership, Audium became the leading provider of VoiceXML IVR development and management tools.

Previously, Bergelson was with First Manhattan Consulting Group, where he advised clients on customer contact strategies, customer profitability and product development.

He also served as co-founder and CEO of Conducive, a leading Internet advertising firm. Bergelson frequently speaks at industry conferences and forums and earned an engineering degree with honors from Cornell University.

Rich Bray
General Manager of the Unified Communications Group, Microsoft

Rich Bray is the general manager of the Unified Communications Group atMicrosoft, where he oversees product development, marketing, and business development for Microsoft Speech Server.

Bray is a Microsoft veteran, and has spent his career driving new businesses forward. His first role was as an evangelist with the Multimedia Systems Group, where he served as a key member of the team responsible for making Windows the primary platform for multimedia software development. In 1992, he joined the consumer division as a product manager for Microsoft Money, eventually rising to general manager of the desktop finance division and building the group’s revenue from less than $2 million to $22 million worldwide. Bray was then promoted to vice president of MSN North America, managing advertising sales, marketing, and business development, as well as the regional P&L. During his tenure in this role, MSN doubled its advertising revenue and achieved profitability as a business unit. Bray joined the Speech Server team in January 2005.

Bray holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Stanford and a master’s degree of business administration from Harvard University. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Bellevue, Wash.

Janet Cahn
Senior Voice User Interface Designer, Bose

Janet Cahn, Ph.D., is a senior voice user interface designer at Bose, where she designs multilingual voice user interfaces for entertainment systems. Prior to working at Bose, she worked in industrial labs at Motorola, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard on speech, natural language, multimodal and wearable technologies. At the MIT Media Laboratory, she developed software for generating expressive synthesized speech. It has been profiled in the printed media, including the New York Times and the MIT Technology Review, and has been incorporated into commercial prototypes of robots and animated characters. Her interactive demo of expressive synthesized speech was exhibited at the First Artificial Intelligence-Based Arts Exhibition, at AAAI in 1992, and later at the Boston Computer Museum for many years.

Cahn has published 16 articles in academic and industrial publications, and is a reviewer for journals and conferences in speech and language technology. She has been an invited speaker and panel member at academic and professional organizations internationally, and has consulted on Web and speech technology for the Lighthouse Project in Thailand.

Cahn received her doctorate in media arts and sciences and master's degree in visual studies from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her bachelor's degree in computer science from Mills College. She is member of ACM/SIGCHI.

Juan Gilbert
Associate Professor, Auburn University

Juan E. Gilbert, Pd.D., earned his doctorate in computer science at the University of Cincinnati (UC) in 2000, a master's degree in computer science from UC in 1995, and a bachelor's degree in systems analysis from Miami University, 1991.

Currently, Gilbert is an associate professor in the computer science and software engineering department at Auburn University. He directs the Human-Centered Computing Lab (HCCL), www.HumanCenteredComputing.org, at Auburn. His research lab consists of more than 20 computer science graduate students. The HCCL does research in spoken language systems, usability, advanced databases and advanced distributed learning systems. The goal of the HCCL is to create innovative solutions to real world problems.

Gilbert teaches Database Systems I and II as well as spoken language systems and natural interactive systems. These courses are advanced graduate-level courses that emphasize the design, implementation, and evaluation of speech and multimodal systems. His students are beginning to enter the speech workforce, where they are obtaining senior-level jobs because they can do design, development, and evaluation at an advanced level.

Gilbert has been very active in the speech community for the past several years. He has been an active member of AVIOS, the VoiceXML Forum and a consistent participant/presenter at SpeechTEK. He has ongoing collaborations with and worked in the past with Jim Larson, Michael McTear, Susan Hura, Andrew Sears, Bill Scholz, Cross Country Automotive Services, EPOS and several others.

Marie Jackson
Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, Intervoice

Marie Jackson,  directs Intervoice’s marketing strategy and programs, including product, corporate marketing and alliances. With more than 20 years of technology-industry experience, Jackson has been instrumental in executing high-impact strategies and campaigns driving sales and business development in the enterprise market. She has held key marketing, sales, and business development management positions at Apple, Taligent, Computer Curriculum, and Icarian. Jackson has been involved in both product and market research and development and possesses a strong communications background that has helped her successfully launch effective direct and indirect marketing programs. Jackson holds a master’s of business administration from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Volker Jantzen
Founder and CEO, SVOX

Volker Jantzen holds degrees in business administration and computer science. His research field at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology comprised text-to-speech, speech recognition and computer linguistics, a field he had also pursued while working at IBM. In 1999, Jantzen cofounded Intelliact. By the end of 2001, when he left the company to fully focus on SVOX’s potential, Intelliact had emerged as the Swiss market leader for product data management (PDM) consulting.

Jantzen has been heading SVOX since April 2000. As founder and CEO, he is the entrepreneurial visionary who drove the company from academia to the commercial marketplace. Under his guidance, SVOX has become the premier provider of embedded TTS solutions. In particular, SVOX is the leading provider of TTS to the automotive industry in Europe. The company’s list of customers comprises many household names such as Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler and Nissan. Jantzen is frequently invited as guest speaker at leading conferences to share his opinion about the evolution of speech interfaces in automotive and mobile devices.

Key to this success was Jantzen’s thorough understanding of technology, along with his sense for true customer needs.

Lizanne Kaiser
Senior Principal Consultant, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories

Lizanne Kaiser, Ph.D., is a senior principal consultant at Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, focusing on the strategic use of speech solutions in contact center environments. Specializing in customer-centric voice user interface design and usability testing, she has created award-winning speech applications and has more than 15 years consulting experience working with Fortune 500 clients. Prior to joining Genesys, Kaiser led speech projects at Edify and General Magic. She presents and publishes regularly in the field, and holds a doctorate in linguistics from Yale University.

Yoon Kim
Chairman and CEO, Novauris Technologies

Yoon Kim, Ph.D., is the chairman and CEO at Novauris Technologies. Prior to joining Novauris, he co-founded NeoSpeech, a speech technology startup in the Silicon Valley. He was with the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory at SRI International, and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. Kim has also served as a member of the ETSI STQ Aurora DSR Standards Workgroup.

Kim has more than 15 years of industry and research experience on many aspects of speech technology and solutions for embedded, network and distributed environments, and has published numerous papers, patents, and international standards-related documents on advanced speech technology for mobile and multimodal applications. As a technologist and visionary, he has given numerous talks at major conferences and workshops on business and technology innovations pertaining to speech technology and multimodal interfaces. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

John Kirst
Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development, TuVox

John Kirst has more than 20 years of call center technology, enterprise software, sales, marketing and business development experience. Kirst started the Voice Response program at IBM/ROLM  with the launch of Direct Talk, the company’s first IVR product. Direct Talk became an industry leading product line and is now the Voice Portal product within IBM’s Web Sphere.

In 1990, Kirst co-founded Edify, a global provider of enterprise CRM and customer contact center software. At Edify, he was responsible for product management of the first releases of Edify's flagship product, Electronic Workforce that became the first software-based platform for Web and voice portal applications. Kirst subsequently held several senior management positions at Edify. As director of worldwide channel and OEM sales, Kirst established and developed Edify's global and regional reseller, OEM and systems integration channels and grew year over year sales by more than 100 percent between 1994 and 1997. While vice president of Asia Pacific/Latin America sales and operations, Kirst started-up and built Edify's business in those regions, created Edify Asia Joint Venture to penetrate the market in China and grew Edify APLA revenue from a base of four percent of total Edify revenues in 1998 to 15 percent in 2002. As senior vice p[resident of worldwide marketing at Edify, Kirst created and led Edify’s strategy to enter the customer service applications segment of the CRM market and following Edify's merger with S1, re-launched and re-positioned Edify as an enterprise provider of multi-channel, contact center automation software.

At TuVox, Kirst is responsible for global sales strategy and execution as well as business partnership strategy and development. He has been responsible for a number of strategic customer acquisitions, including one of the largest telecom providers in the AsiaPac region. In September 2005, Kirst spearheaded TuVox’s acquisition of NetByTel's hosted speech application business, strengthening TuVox's position in the speech application market and accelerating the company's growth and expertise in new vertical markets such as retail and financial services. Kirst holds a master's degree in business administration from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College and an undergraduate degree in economics from Stanford University.

Peter Mahoney
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Speech Division, Nuance Communications

Peter Mahoney is responsible for worldwide marketing strategy, customer programs, external communications and industry marketing. Prior to joining Nuance, Mahoney was vice president of marketing and product management at Performaworks, a leading supplier of goal-driven performance management software. Mahoney has held executive positions in marketing, product management, sales and business development with leaders in CRM, telecommunications, and enterprise software including IBM, PictureTel, Engage and ATG. Mahoney holds degrees in physics and computer science from Boston College.

Bruce Pollock
Vice President of Professional Services, West Interactive

Bruce Pollock is vice president of professional services at West Interactive. He manages West's professional services and speech recognition businesses.

Pollock has 17 years of business management experience spanning across a number of vertical industries including financial services, transportation and technology. His writings have been published in numerous industry journals including Speech Technology magazine, Energy Customer Management, Contact Professional Magazine, and others. Pollock has also been cited in The Economist magazine and other leading publications and has served as a panelist and moderator at technology industry events and forums.

Pollock is a member of the board of directors of the VoiceXML Forum and the American Voice Input-Output Society (AVIOS).

Before joining West, Pollock was co-founder and vice president of Voci, a speech recognition startup company based in San Jose, Calif.

He has an master's degree from the Ivey School at the University of Western Ontario.

Ken Rehor
Independent Consultant

Prior to setting out on his own, Ken Rehor was the chief architect of Vocalocity. He currently serves as chair of the VoiceXML Forum, chair of the Forum’s Conformance Committee, and cochair of the Speaker Biometrics Committee. Rehor is co-author of VoiceXML 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0 and CCXML 1.0. He previously was a member of the Bell Labs Research team at Lucent Technologies where he co-developed the first Web-based telephony platform, PhoneWeb in 1995. He holds seven U.S. and international patents in telecommunications and speech technologies.

Manish Sharma
Leader of Portfolio and Strategy for Multimedia Applications, Nortel Networks

Manish Sharma, Ph.D., oversees Nortel's global speech solutions consulting and services practice utilizing latest speech technologies. Prior to joining Nortel Networks, he was vice president of advanced technology research at T-NETIX, responsible for its SpeakEZ Voice Verification product development. Sharma was a co-founder of SpeakEZ, a spin-off venture from Rutgers University, with verification products acquired by ScanSoft (now part of Nuance Communications). He holds a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University, holds several patents, and is published widely in the area of speech processing technology. He has been voted as one of the "Top 10 Leaders in Speech" by Speech Technology magazine subscribers.

His team at Nortel has been responsible for delivering market-leading speech solutions for such customers as, Bank of America, AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, American Airlines, Canadian Railways, Hewlett Packard, Pacific Gas & Electricity and Kaiser Permanente.

Jonathan Taylor
President and CEO, Voxeo

Jonathan Taylor combined his experience in both business operations and technology innovation to found Voxeo in 1999. Under his guidance, Voxeo has seen triple-digit revenue growth for four consecutive years and has been profitable since January, 2004. Prior to Voxeo, Taylor founded and helped bring three additional software and infrastructure service companies to profitability.

From 1995 to 1997, Taylor was the founder and president of InterResearch and Development Group (IRdg). IRdg created and licensed iPost - the first Internet powered OEM unified messaging solution - to leading telecommunications providers including Ericsson, Motorola and Unisys. IRdg was acquired by Elron Electronic Industries subsidiary MediaGate in 1997.

Prior to IRdg, Taylor helped relaunch Columbia Data Products (CDP), manufacturer of the first IBM compatible computer - with an emphasis on OEM storage technology.

Isabella Villani
Speech Recognition Consultant, Dimension Data

Isabella Villani has six years of experience in the field of Speech Recognition. She graduated from La Trobe University with a bachelor's degree in speech pathology, with a particular interest in linguistics, acoustics, phonetics, verbal and non verbal communication and psychology.

Villani entered the IT industry in 2001, focusing on speech recognition technology for two of Australia’s largest speech vendors, Pracom and Dimension Data. Dimension Data has a presence in many countries and its global ‘Centre of Excellence’ in speech recognition is located in Australia. Dimension Data’s Voice User Interface (VUI) and Persona work for telecommunications clients such as Telstra and Vodafone has won Dimension Data and its clients international acclaim in two of the world’s most applauded speech forums, SpeechTEK and Conversations. Dimension Data’s Vodafone application won four awards at the 2005 SpeechTEK conference, plus the coveted ‘Global Best Practice’ award at Conversations.

In Villani’s current role as a speech recognition consultant, she is involved in the complete speech recognition lifecycle from responding to tenders, requirements analysis, persona development, VUI design, usability, testing, deployment and tuning. She uses her knowledge and experience of user centred design principles and industry standards in dialogue, prompt and persona design when consulting in Voice User Interface (VUI) design. Villani is heavily involved in client education espousing the value of speech recognition technology, the speech recognition lifecycle, benefits of speech recognition to an organization, return on investment, relevant technologies and industry trends.

Villani began her career as a speech pathologist working for ComTEC – disability communication and technology solutions. She specialized in working with people with intellectual and physical disabilities. During her time at ComTEC, she was state training manager and a member of the editorial committee for the ‘AGOSCI News’ (Australian Group on Severe Communication Impairment), a quarterly journal distributed to members Australia wide.

For two years, Villani was a Victorian branch executive member of Speech Pathology Australia, Victorian editor and publications and information technology portfolio leader. Villani obtained advertising interest in order to generate revenue, sourced articles and liaised with special interest groups, health professionals, consumers and members. She ensured Victorian publication deadlines were met for the National Stop Press (a monthly magazine distributed to members).

Villani believes that the Australian market for speech recognition is growing fast, and clients are now clearly seeing the benefits of speech. Vendors are able to demonstrate the benefits of speech recognition – improving customer experience, workforce optimization, market differentiation and return on investment.

Tiemo Winterkamp
Co-Founder and VP, VoiceObjects

Tiemo Winterkamp is one of the founders of VoiceObjects AG and holds the position as VP strategy & market research. From 1997 to 2001, he worked for MicroStrategy in Germany in various positions and joined in 2000 a venture team at MicroStrategy’s U.S. headquarters to develop and market a voice portal project named Angel.com. Before that he worked for Informix, Software AG, and Ingres. He holds a master's degree in computer science.

Michael Zirngibl
President & CEO, Angel.com

Michael Zirngibl is the founder and president of Angel.com and is responsible for the company's business, product and technology strategies.

Zirngibl holds numerous voice messaging patents and continues his track record of technology innovation. Driven by his vision to make speech applications as ubiquitous and easy-to-use as the Internet, Zirngibl established Angel.com, a provider of on-demand speech and IVR solutions. To date, more than 1,500 customers have implemented more than 7,000 voice applications using Angel.com, including Virtual Call Centers, Store Locators and Speech-Enabled IVR Surveys. Current customers include Reebok, KB Toys, Kellogg’s and Borland Software.

Prior to Angel.com, Zirngibl led product management for Microstrategy's Broadcaster and Telecaster voice messaging products. In addition, he was the founding partner of a marketing and IT consulting firm in Munich, Germany. He holds a master's degree in business administration from Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. Zirngibl’s master's thesis investigated innovative marketing strategies for new communication networks, such as one-to-one personalization based on real-time analysis of customer behavior.

Deborah Dahl
Consultant, Conversational Technologies

Deborah Dahl, Ph.D., is a consultant in speech and natural language understanding technologies, with more than 20 years of experience in the field. Her interests are in practical natural language and spoken dialog systems, the standards that support them, and how these technologies can be applied to improve our lives. As part of her interest in standards, she serves as chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Multimodal Interaction Working Group. This group is developing standards for the World Wide Web which will make it possible to use speech and pen input with Web pages. It includes 54 members representing 28 organizations. Dahl has also contributed to the W3C standards for spoken dialog (VoiceXML) and speech grammars (SRGS). She is also  cochair of the W3C Hypertext Coordination Group, which coordinates activities across the W3C Interaction Domain (including for example, VoiceXML, HTML, and CSS).

Prior to starting her consulting business in 2002, Dahl worked for Unisys, developing natural language systems and spoken dialog systems as well as software tools for developing these systems. Initially her work at Unisys was funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). As part of the DARPA Human Language Technology program, Dahl chaired DARPA activities in the evaluation of speech and natural language technology which led to the ATIS (Air Travel Information System) corpus. After over 10 years, this corpus continues to be used to drive speech technology research. At Unisys, Dahl also led internal projects applying speech recognition to Air Traffic Control. In 1994, Dahl initiated efforts at Unisys to develop commercial speech and natural language applications, leading teams which developed commercial spoken language understanding technology and related development tools.

Caroline Henton
Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Talknowledgy

Caroline Henton, Ph.D.,  has directed projects in speech synthesis, linguistics, localization, and VUI design for Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, Unisys, Lexicon Naming, VCS/Philips, General Magic, DEC, Fonix, Tellme, Elan, and NeoSpeech. She has 65 technical publications, and four patents.

Daniel Hong
Senior Analyst, Datamonitor

Daniel Hong heads Datamonitor’s speech recognition technology research. He is the author of several reports that examine the current opportunities, relevant issues and future direction of the global voice business market. Daniel has also written many industry white papers and engaged in numerous consultancy projects for various Fortune 1000 companies.

Prior to joining Datamonitor, Hong was a research associate at the Columbia Business School’s Institute of Tele-Information, where he spearheaded the institute’s technology research initiatives. In the past, Hong also worked for embedded software, telecommunications and semiconductor companies in research, business development, marketing and strategic planning roles.

Hong holds a bachelor's degree in social sciences from the University of California at Irvine.

Nancy Jamison
Industry Analyst, Jamison Consulting

Nancy Jamison, Ph.D., is an independent consultant specializing in speech technologies, voice processing, contact centers, and computer telephony integration (CTI).

As an industry analyst, she has written industry reports and white papers, marketing collateral and prepared competitive market analysis and market assessments. She provides a number of services to both vendor and end user clients including market research, strategic planning and custom consulting, which includes market analysis and facilitation of partner relationships for vendors and due diligence on start-up companies for venture capitalists. She has independently authored numerous white papers for vendors in the area of speech technologies and contact centers, including papers for SpeechWorks, Scansoft, Edify, Mitel, Witness Systems, Glenayre, Convergys, Webley, Intervoice, Locus Dialog, Vertical Networks and Onvisource. Jamison also works in collaboration with other analysts and consultants. For example, in 2000 she co-authored a multi-client study on Next Generation PBX VARs along with the IN-Fusion Group, and collaborated on a pilot study for the BioMarket project, completed in 2003, which surveyed the general public as to their awareness and acceptance of biometrics. Additionally, she writes articles for the general trade press, and regularly writes for Speech Technology magazine.

Jamison's 25 years of industry experience include five years as a principal analyst at Gartner Group/Dataquest, in the Voice Systems North America program of Dataquest’s Telecommunications group. While working at Dataquest, she was responsible for conducting market research and analysis of several markets, creating US and Worldwide market share and forecasts for the voice processing market, and working with clients on tactical and strategic planning. In addition, Jamison has spoken at many customer and industry events, both domestically and internationally. During her tenure at Dataquest she authored numerous industry reports including:

• The Care and Feeding of Alternate Distribution Channels - 1997
• Scoring a Hit Against Microsoft Windows NT - 1997
• Call Center Expresso - 1997
• Voice Processing - A Global Market Look - 1998
• Unified, Universal Integrated Messaging - What's the Difference? - 1998
• Personal Telephony - Real Solutions at Affordable Prices - 1998
• State of the Industry - Voice Processing - 1998
• Speech Recognition in Telephony - An Industry Update - 1998
• Personal Telephony - The Virtual Assistant Market? - 1999

Prior to Dataquest, Jamison spent 13 years at ROLM (now owned by Siemens), in marketing, product planning and competitive analysis. She worked on ROLM PBXs, the original CallPath CTI products, and was brand manager for all of ROLM’s OEM IVR products, including those from Syntellect, InterVoice and IBM. Jamison has a bachelor's degree in linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley.

James A. Larson
Consultant, Larson Technical Services

Jim Larson, Ph.D., is chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium's Voice Browser Working Group that is standardizing VoiceXML 2.0 and related markup languages for developing speech applications. Prior to starting his own consultancy, he was manager of advanced human input/output at Intel. Larson also teaches courses in developing speech applications at Portland State University and the Oregon Graduate School in Oregon Health and Sciences University. He is a columnist for Speech Technology magazine and co-program chair for SpeechTEK Conference each year in New York City. He is the author of VoiceXML Guide, a home study course available from www.vxmlguide.com.

Judith Markowitz
President, J. Markowitz, Consultants and Technology Editor, Speech Technology Magazine

Judith A. Markowitz, Ph.D., is recognized internationally as the leading independent analyst in voice-based biometrics (speaker verification and identification) and as one of the leaders in speech processing. For more than 20 years, she has provided technical and strategic consulting to organizations with from two-person startups to 100,000-employee corporations. Those clients include Motorola, FNMA, and Novell.

Markowitz is  a member of the editorial review board of the International Journal of Speech Technology, co-chair of the VoiceXML Speaker Biometrics Committee, and an invited expert to the World Wide Web Consortium's Voice Browser Working Group’s Speaker Identification and Verification working group.

William Meisel
President, TMA Associates

Backed by 30 years of experience in advanced speech technology and telephony products and markets, William Meisel, Ph.D., has been an independent consultant since 1991. Meisel ran a speech recognition company for a decade, and wrote the first textbook on computer pattern recognition early in his career. In October 2003, he was named one of the "Top Ten Leaders in Speech" based on an online survey by Speech Technology magazine. He is executive director of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society, a non-profit organization for the advancement of speech technology applications. Meisel is a popular speaker and organizer at industry conferences; for example, in 2005, he helped organize the SpeechTEK West program and gave a tutorial on vendor selection and was the moderator for the entire Voice World Europe conference, as well as giving the keynote address.

Meisel started Speech Recognition Update in January 1993. Telephone Strategy News was split off from Speech Recognition Update in February 2004 as that market grew. Meisel authored influential market studies, including The Advanced Speech Technology Market, Trends in Speech Recognition, and, in February 1998, The Telephony Voice User Interface; Speech Recognition, Text-To-Speech, and Speaker Verification over the Telephone, which some credit as providing a blueprint for today’s telephone speech recognition market. He created and held The Telephony Voice User Interface conference for six years, before merging it in 2005 with SpeechTEK West. Meisel has particularly studied the telephone market and trends that are shaping the major changes in that market, while continuing to analyze and cover the broader speech recognition market.

Meisel’s background includes a solid technical foundation. He has a doctorate in electrical engineering and has to his credit more than 60 publications, including technical and marketing articles, and five patents.

Walter Rolandi
Founder and Owner, The Voice User Interface Co.

Walter Rolandi, Ph.D., has more than 20 years of experience in applied artificial intelligence. He has developed and deployed expert systems for Blue Cross and Blue Shield, NCR (both in Columbia, S.C., and in Milan, Italy) and Horizon Research, (a Mitsubishi R&D company). Areas of research have included expert systems, knowledge engineering methodology, machine learning, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition, text-to-speech technologies and conversational dialogue systems. Before founding The Voice User Interface Co., Rolandi was the director of applied research for Conita Technologies, a speech application and platform company. There, he was responsible for the definition and evaluation of the "user experience." Additionally, his duties included the creation and incorporation of new methods and technologies to enhance the intelligence of Conita's Personal Virtual Assistants. Avaya acquired the company in early 2002.

FRolandi has been very active in the speech community, making presentations a number of speech industry conferences.

William 'Bill' Scholz
President, Applied Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS)

Prior to taking the reins at AVIOS, William Sholz, Ph.D., was the solution management architect director at Unisys, where he was esponsible for speech and dialogue management technology for the global telecommunications industry. He co-founded the Speech and Natural Language initiative at Unisys in the early 1990s and managed the design and development of an integrated tool suite for building dialog applications. He was responsible for advanced technology development and the custom engineering of speech and multimodal applications, and served as the corporation’s spokesman for speech and service creation technology. He holds a doctorate in cognitive science from Indiana University.

Robin Springer
President, Computer Talk

“She’s been using her computer by voice longer than most people have been using their computers by keyboard.” That’s how a project manager at Microsoft described Robin Springer’s experience in the speech recognition industry.

Springer has been involved in the speech recognition technology industry since 1995. She is president of Computer Talk, a full-service consulting firm that specializes in providing hands-free computer technology and training. Springer founded the company to address the growing community of individuals who were suffering from musculoskeletal injuries and required assistive technologies to remain in the workplace.

Springer has helped thousands of desktop dictation users increase their productivity and accommodate for pain associated with physical disabilities. Her clients include lawyers, financiers, doctors, government agencies, writers, educational institutions and industry executives. She is currently involved in designing new products that integrate speech technology, and she is a speech-recognition and accessibility consultant for many companies, including Microsoft.

Springer’s vision is to improve technological accessibility and productivity, regardless of physical ability. An advocate for individuals with disabilities, she believes shifting the paradigm of disability from one of inability to a spectrum of abilities can only be accomplished through education, integration and by understanding that human beings have unlimited potentials.

Furthering this goal, Springer has been a columnist for Speech Technology magazine, beginning in 1999, and serves on the magazine’s advisory board. She regularly contributes to other publications, including SIMILAR Dreams, published by the SIMILAR European Network of Excellence, dedicated to multimodal interfaces. She is currently conducting the second phase of a longitudinal study on opportunities for the physically disabled in post-baccalaureate education.

Whether Robin Springer is speaking on how to include individuals with disabilities in the workplace or assisting screenwriters in refining their creative processes, she helps people by making their experiences smooth ones. Now, through Springer’s advanced approaches, virtually anyone can participate in the world of technological advances, with renewed confidence and ability – and success.