Maria Aretoulaki    Group moderator

- 13 years of experience in Voice User Interfaces (VUI Design) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies and applications focusing on user-centred and user-friendly but also robust and efficient interfaces (since 1996)

- I have worked for more than 10 different speech application providers, in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland (e.g. Intervoice / Convergys, VoxGen, JamIP, Sympalog and SemanticEdge)

- I have provided VUI Design services to more than 20 different customers, including the National Health Service, Barclays and CapGemini in the UK, Sony and Vodafone D2 in Germany, Swisscom in Switzerland, and Gerson Lehrman in the US.

- I have designed, developed, tested and tuned speech and touchtone applications across more than 15 different verticals, including banking, telecomms, retail, and the British and German Governments.

- I have designed voice services for English and German (availability for Greek and French)

- I am multilingual and multicultural. Originally from Greece, I have spent the last two decades between the UK and Germany, and apart from English, German, and Greek, I also speak French fluently.

- Originally a Linguist, I hold a PhD and a Post-Doc in Engineering subjects and have authored among others the Chapter on Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Oxford University Press "Handbook of Computational Linguistics"

- I can relate to people of all ages and from many different cultural, educational, social and linguistic backgrounds. I am particularly well-versed in copywriting for social marketing (esp. 15-30-year-olds)

- I have got at least a decade of experience in People and Project Management.

- I set up my own Consultancy in 2008, DialogCONNECTION Ltd,, as a "One-Stop Shop" for VUI Design and Copywriting services, Speech Technology consulting and training. Based in Manchester (UK), I've got clients all over the world.


SPECIALTIES
- vision, requirements specification, Discovery Workshops
- Voice User Interface (VUI) design / call flow design, repair strategies
- persona design, prompt design and branding, copywriting, voice talent coaching
- Usability testing, Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) testing
- ASR / speech recognition grammars
- Tuning (grammars, prompts, pronunciations, speech engine parameters, repair strategies)
- multilingual applications, localisation of prompts
- Technology evaluations, market analysis

INDUSTRIES / VERTICALS:
- Banking (telephone banking, automated payment systems)
- Retail (online shopping, branch locator)
- Government (citizen helplines)
- Voice Dialling (automated company switchboard)
- Voice-to-text mobile applications
- Travel (information and booking)
- Speech navigation
- multimodal assistance

COUNTRIES:
- UK, Ireland
- Germany, Austria, Switzerland
- US