SpeechTEK Mobile Program

Cliff Bell Product Line Manager Product Management Genesys

Cliff Bell is the intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) Solution Manager at Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, focused on coordinating requirements for and delivery of innovative, cross-channel products to enable dramatic improvement of the customer experience with contact center applications. With 11 years of product marketing and product management experience driving contact center software, he has lead teams across many strategic software releases and currently chairs the iCFD Community of Interest within Alcatel-Lucent. Cliff holds an B.A. from McPherson College.

Dr. Greg Bielby has been researching and developing voice recognition technology for over 20 years.  With a special interest in extremely high volume automated dialogs, Greg has contributed significantly to advancing the state of how callers interact with speech-enabled applications.  He holds a number of patents for speech recognition algorithms with Bell Northern Research and Nortel Networks. Greg has earned a Ph.D in Speech Research from the University of Adelaide.  He currently leads an engineering team responsible for the application of voice recognition in Directory Assistance Automation for VoltDelta.  

Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D. is a Senior VUI Designer for SpeechCycle. Jon has designed speech IVR interfaces for dozens of large organizations, including Amtrak, Verizon, Guardian, Baltimore Gas and Electric, Charter, Nestle, and Microsoft. Before SpeechCycle, Jon was a lead designer at Nuance Communications and Dragon Systems. In addition to IVR’s, Jon has also designed in-car speech interfaces for Ford and Jaguar.

Dr. Ahmed Bouzid heads the Partnerships program at Angel.com and has over 15 years of experience in the Speech and Natural Language Processing industry. He has written widely on Voice User Interface design and Natural Language Processing. He is the author of the VUI post blog at http://www.thevuipost.com.

Susan has been designing speech UIs for more than 19 years. She earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from UMass Amherst and went on to lead the forward looking design team at Bell Labs that developed early natural language spoken dialogue systems. From there she went on to pioneer early efforts in automating local search. Susan has run her own consulting business, and then joined Tellme in 2004 to further her work in voice search. Last year at SpeechTek she shared some research on the benefits that speech brings to the in-car environment. This year she’s back to lead a discussion on what we’ve learned about the in-car environment in the past year.

Monique Bozeman is a strategic and tactical marketing consultant with over 20 years experience in voice, speech, CTI, CRM, call center, document management and email management technologies and applications.  Recent vendor experience includes senior-level marketing roles at VoiceObjects, where she drove all product marketing activities; five years at Genesys, (Alcatel-Lucent) covering  competitive intelligence worldwide and all go-to-market activities for the core of the Genesys suite; and stints at eCRM vendor Kana Software and document management and workflow vendor FileNet/IBM.  Ms. Bozeman also served four years as director of research and product development for Inc.-500 startup-up IPC which pioneered some of the first U.S. and European conferences, trade shows and magazines (Voice Processing Magazine) and market studies for the speech, voice and call center markets.

Laura is passionate about defining the best customer engagement solutions regardless of technology or channel. With 10 years experience in customer care and contact center, she currently leads product marketing at West Interactive with a particular interest in customer engagement for emerging channels including mobility and social media.

Vicki Broman Senior Principal CTI and Speech Solutions eLoyalty® a TeleTech Company Phoenix Fire Department Crisis Counselor;CHt

Vicki Broman is a Senior Principal for eLoyalty® a TeleTech Company with over 22 years experience as a Voice User Interface (VUI) designer and Project Manager. Vicki’s applications set new standards for Voice Self Service (VSS) VUI Best Practices. Her designs have increased Voice Self Service Rates over 500% and customer satisfaction surveys have shown significant improvement after implementation. Vicki has been a presenter at conferences for SpeechTek, Nuance, Sterling Audits, Rockwell, AT&T and other companies. She developed classes in VUI Best Practices that have been presented to numerous customers worldwide. With close to 20 years working with speech technology, she has integrated proven Best Practices based on usability testing results, to enhance end to end customer service for her customers. Her expertise has been shown in designs of applications for numerous companies in industries that include financial (securities, credit card, banking), government, utilities, insurance (health, vehicle/home/business), prescription services, airlines, travel agencies and cosmetics corporations. Vicki was awarded patent in Speech Recognition Fraud application Design Concept Nov. 20, 2007. 

Bill Brown Director of Worldwide Product Marketing Adeptra

Adeptra’s Bill Brown has more than twenty years of experience in defining and managing customer relationship strategies and customer experience for some of the world’s largest companies. He has hands-on experience in devising and deploying strategies in the financial and card issuer space, having worked for MBNA America and Providian Financial Corporation, with roles across the card lifecycle from lending to collections, including fraud detection, risk detection and credit line increase processing and core customer experience management. While at Providian Financial Corporation, which was sold to Washington Mutual for approximately US$6.5 billion in October 2005, Brown ran Risk Management for the sub-prime portfolio and the Consolidated Disputes Group. Brown is a graduate of Widener University in Chester, PA.

Mike Burke CTO & Vice President of Professional Services IQ Services IEEE, Communications Technology Assn of MN

Mike has nearly 40 years of experience in telecommunications, contact centers and networking. Since joining IQ Services, Mike’s directed hundreds of engagements for customers worldwide representing all verticals. Prior to IQ Services, Mike was involved in a 90s Internet start–up, wrote code for Centrex, designed and built networks for the DoD and helped introduce DSL for the RBOCs.