My Story

(the short version)

I've been on the forefront of conversation design for voice and chat since the early 2000's. After learning the fundamentals about speech and NLU in graduate school (MSEE from SPAPL at UCLA), I spent years at  companies like Nuance and Amazon designing some of the world's top voice assistants.

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I started my industry career evaluating and improving IVR systems, reviewing customer data and tuning speech recognition grammars and parameters. I soon realized that most often the *design* was the most important success factor; if the question had been asked differently, or the flow of the conversation had gone in a different order, the customer could've completed their task. That's how my career in Conversation Design (CxD) began.

Over the last 20+ years, I've done everything from pre-sales to prototyping to design to post-deployment improvements for customers like Charles Schwab, Expedia, and Jaguar Land Rover. Most recently, I led the core CxD team for Alexa+, covering a broad range of areas: Conversational Excellence, Personality, Discovery, Subscriptions and Growth, and Trust (Privacy, Accessibility, and Responsible AI).

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I'm passionate about creating natural, intuitive conversational interfaces that solve real customer problems. From voice to chat, audio-only to audio + screen, I have launched a multitude of new features across form factors with the same common goals: making people's lives easier, removing friction from everyday tasks, and adding surprise and delight where I can.

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The last few years have seen a revolution in voice and chat interfaces; deterministic systems are becoming less and less common as generative AI and LLM-based systems take over. While the design artifacts have changed, the core principles of CxD remain the same.  What do conversation design specifications look nowadays? They are less like flows and tables, more like sample interactions and instructions to the model.

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With my decades of experience and deeply technical background, I am uniquely positioned to lead products and teams into this new era of conversation design.

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