Seattle Chapter

The Applied Voice I/O Society (AVIOS) is an international organization of speech technology professionals that seeks to build community and bridge the gap between basic research and applied product development. We have launched a local chapter in Seattle with the mission to:

• Build a vibrant speech technology community in the Pacific Northwest to encourage future commercial and research partnerships

• Increase awareness of current and future speech technology trends

• Stimulate innovation and further investment into speech technology

Our goal is to bring together researchers, industry suppliers, companies using speech technology, developers and designers of speech applications, business managers, system developers, students, and users of speech technology. We plan on organizing three to four meetups per year. Each event will include a formal talk as well as time for networking. Please RSVP for events on our Meetup.com page - http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-AVIOS-Speech-Technology-Meetup/.

We are always looking for ideas for potential speakers. Please email psimons@ihearnetwork.com if you or someone you know is interested.

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Past Events

13 February 2014 | Talk by William Tunstall-Pedoe

Presenter: William Tunstall-Pedoe

 

Evi (formerly True Knowledge) is a Cambridge, England based business specializing in the automatic answering of questions on any subject. Amazon acquired the business in October 2012 and thus now has a team with this expertise (and a Cambridge-based development center). The Evi smartphone application (iPhone and Android) can already answer unlimited numbers of open-domain questions asked by customers using voice.

 

16 May 2013 | Windows Mobile and Speech Technology

Presenter: Rob Chambers

 

Rob Chambers from Microsoft will be speaking about the evolution of speech in Windows Phone from WP 7 through WP8. He will share insights on key user pain points, and solutions offered by WP8 and other Microsoft products. Finally, he will demonstrate the WP 8 Speech Developer APIs.

 

28 February 2013 | Physically Situated Spoken Language Interaction: Opportunities and Challenges

Presenter: Dan Bohus

 

Most research to date on spoken language interaction has focused on supporting dialog with single users in limited domains and contexts. Efforts in this space have led to significant progress, including wide-scale deployments of telephony-based systems, multimodal voice search applications and voice-enabled personal assistants. At the same time, numerous and important challenges in the realm of physically situated, open-world interaction (e.g., Xbox avatars in the living room, in-car systems, robots in a public space) have remained largely unaddressed.

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Chapter Leads

Sabrina Burleigh, Language Development Manager, Nuance Communications

 

Gina-Anne Levow, Assistant Professor, University of Washington
 

Brian Lysak, Director – New Market Development, Nuance Communications
 

Paul Simons, CEO, iHear Network
 

Nikko Strom, Principal Software Development Engineer, Amazon.com
 

Michael Tjalve, Senior Program Manager Speech, Microsoft

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Contact the Seattle Chapter