DialogCONNECTION was founded in 2008 by our Director and Lead Consultant, Dr. Maria Aretoulaki. Maria has been designing Speech IVRs and Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) since 1996, long before Voice Assistants, but also before telephone self-service was mainstream. She got into Voice through a Post-Doc in Spoken Dialogue Management for Speech recognition applications, after having got a PhD and an MSc in NLP and Machine Learning and a BA (Hons) in Linguistics & English.

In this episode, Dr. Maria explains how she started in the data space. When looking through the list of available master's degrees, she found one in machine translation and was utterly fascinated. Dr. Maria learned how to translate Spanish sentences into English sentences using machine translation. There are all sorts of rules and contexts that the machine needs to learn. For instance, because language is complex, it's difficult for a machine to pick out which sentences belong in the summary of an article. Humans can't even all agree on which sentences belong in a summary!

Quotes:

• “[To start your own company] You're never that prepared.”
• “Usually we were approaching people to do a project, but rarely would "go live" materialise.”
• “Flexibility, multitasking and resilience are the main lessons.”
• “How you formulate a question is really important.”
• “But also you get an insight into things you haven't even thought about.”
• “Every single connection is valuable”

Read the full episode summary here: Episode #122

Enjoy the show!