I'm a member of Cisco's Voice Technology Group where I work on improving communication and customer service through the invention and application of new speech and telecom technologies. I've previously served in engineering, R&D, and executive roles at various industry leaders such as Vocalocity, Nuance, AT&T and Lucent Technologies.  

I work extensively in the technical standards activities of the VoiceXML Forum ,  Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  Judith Markowitz and I co-chair the Forum's Speaker Biometrics Committee where we focus on speaker verification and identification (SIV) for VoiceXML. Ian Sutherland (of Oracle) and I chair of the VoiceXML Forum's Conformance Committee, where we run the VoiceXML platform certification program, standard test suite, and testing infrastructure to compare VoiceXML platforms, tools, and applications. I continue to service on the Board of Directors, where I previously served as Chair (2006) and co-Chair (2005). 

In the W3C Voice Browser Working Group (VBWG), I'm a co-editor of VoiceXML 2.0 and VoiceXML 2.1 and VoiceXML 3.0; I design new telephony call control features as part of the Call Control subgroup and serve as a co-editor of CCXML 1.0. In 2001, Speech Technology Magazine's readers voted me as one of the 20 most influential people in the speech technology industry for my foundational work on web-based telephony and creating the VoiceXML Forum. I speak frequently at industry events such as SpeechTEK and VoiceCon.

For several years I was VP and Chief Architect at Vocalocity, Inc., a communications software company that specialized in software for telecom OEMs and service providers. I was responsible for Vocalocity's standards leadership and product architecture. As a Software Architect at Nuance Communications, I investigated architecture for the next-generation Voice Web and developed new VoiceXML features for NVP (nee VWS). I've worked as a consultant at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, NJ, where I designed new telephony features for VoiceXML, and led a project to demonstrate new VoIP-based telephone services for the AT&T Network. In 2000, I worked as CTO at a start-up called Enuncia Communications where we built an innovative and robust VoiceXML server along with some cutting-edge tools.

I've been interested in telecommunications for many years. I was a Member of Technical Staff in the Software Production Research Department in the Communications Software Research Center of the Bell Laboratories Research division of Lucent Technologies from 1992 through 2000. In 1995 I helped build the first web-based telephony platform, PhoneWeb, programmed with what we called the Phone Markup Language (PML).  In March 1999 I started the VoiceXML Forum with AT&T, IBM, and Motorola to develop a standard voice telephony markup language based on our research and products. On August 25, 1999, we released the first draft (0.9) of the VoiceXML specification.  On March 7, 2000, we announced the publication of the VoiceXML 1.0 specification. Soon thereafter, we submitted VoiceXML 1.0 to the W3C, which was formally acknowledged on May 22, 2000 when the W3C Voice Browser Working Group announced it had voted at its May 10-12 meeting in Paris to adopt VoiceXML 1.0 as the basis for the development of a W3C dialog markup language.

For more information about my work related to VoiceXML, see my list of external publications, talks, and patents. For a glimpse of the VoiceXML industry, see my World of VoiceXML site.