Who We Are

Kristie Goss
Kristie is a Human Factors Consultant at Convergys. She holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Auburn University, where she studied human centered computing under the guidance of Dr. Juan Gilbert, a prominent member of the Speech community. Kristie has worked on speech applications and performed usability for numerous clients and is a co-inventor on a patent, “Method and System for Creating Natural Language Understanding Grammars”. She's been working in this industry since 2004 and has presented multiple talks at SpeechTEK conferences in the past.

Tara Kelly
Founder, President & CEO of SPLICE Software, Tara Kelly, has spent the last 23 years designing and delivering enhanced customer experience solutions using personalized human voice messaging. SPLICE enables clients to engage in a meaningful, Data-Driven DialogTM with their customers. Tara's expertise is multi-dimensional but focused on bringing a common sense human touch experience to businesses that use technology to enhance operations, service and customer care.

James Lewis
James R. (Jim) Lewis is a senior human factors engineer (at IBM since 1981), with a primary focus on the design and evaluation of voice user interfaces. He is a Certified Human Factors Professional with a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology (Psycholinguistics). He has experience in all areas of speech system usability, is the author of Practical Speech User Interface Design (2011), and in 2012 was voted onto the board of the Association of Voice Interaction Design, currently serving as immediate past-president.

Rebecca Loose
Becky has been a voice user interaction designer since 2007. Her design, usability testing, and tuning experience falls across a number of verticals, including health care, consumer electronics, transportation, and telecommunications. She is particularly interested in how voice UI and other modes of input can supplement each other to create multimodal interfaces. She has a masters degree in cognitive science from Johns Hopkins University, and she is a member of AVIxD.

Jenni McKienzie
Jenni has been doing voice design since 2000. She has given numerous presentations and tutorials at SpeechTEK, UPA, and Mobile Voice. As a regular participant in the AVIxD design workshops, she has co-authored several articles published in Speech Technology Magazine and at AVIxD's website. She was a founding board member of AVIxD, and kicked off this design guidelines documentation project in 2012.

Crispin Reedy
Crispin Reedy is a Voice User Experience designer and usability professional with over 10 years of front-line design, speech usability, and tuning experience across a variety of industries, including financial, telecommunications, health care and transportation. She is especially interested in what other disciplines can bring to Voice Interaction Design, and how we can best leverage real-world data to make good design decisions. She is currently serving on the board of AVIxD as President, and can be followed @crispinTX.

Phil Shinn
Phil Shinn has been designing and building speech applications since 1984. He is a UI designer, speech scientist, application developer and business analyst at Morgan Stanley. He has experience in call center technology, text processing, biometrics and financial services. He started and moderates the VUIDs group on Yahoo , has served on the board of AVIxD, co-authored the open source VUI design toolkit, and has a Ph.D. in Linguistics. A list of publications and presentations is here.

Mark Smolensky
Mark Smolensky is a Principle Member of Technical Staff with AT&T. He is responsible for providing user experience strategic and technical direction and leadership to clients, conducting user research on the design of speech-enabled multimodal, and graphical applications interfaces for internal AT&T and external enterprise clients, and designing speech-enabled application logic. He has been involved in voice user interface design since 1986. He is the author of Human Factors in Air Traffic Control (1998), has authored dozens of human factors papers, and in 2012 was voted on to the board of the Association of Voice Interaction Design as Vice-President. Dr. Smolensky holds a Ph.D. in Human Factors Psychology (Human Computer Interaction) and a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology.

Helen Vanscoy
Helen VanScoy is the Director of User Interface design at Performance Technology Partners. She has been working in the field of Voice User Interface Design and Usability since 1995, with experience designing, testing and tuning speech-enabled and DTMF systems. A linguist by education, Helen is fully bilingual in English and Spanish, and she has leveraged her knowledge of phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics in her designs, contributing to her understanding of human-computer interaction. Her familiarity with Spanish language and culture stems from having lived in Spanish-speaking countries and studying Spanish language and linguistics.

Leslie Carroll Walker
Leslie Carroll Walker and her team at Convergys provide consultation services for speech and DTMF user interface design, as well as for our multi-channel solution, which includes knowledge management, incident management, email, and chat. Leslie has been working in speech technology, user interface design, and contact center optimization since 1998. She has done everything from phonetic segmentation of speech data to project management to team-leading multi-million dollar process re-designs. Recently, her interest and focus has been on analytics, data-driven design, and cross-channel customer experience. Leslie has presented at both Speechtek and Mobile Voice.

Jamey White
Jamey White is currently a Human Factors Consultant at Convergys and has been involved with speech application interface design since 2006. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Auburn University, where he was a part of the Human Centered Computing Lab under Dr. Juan Gilbert. Through his experience, he has designed and tested various IVR applications from DTMF touch-tone to natural language understanding covering a broad spectrum of industry verticals. His recent interest includes multi-channel integrations, particularly from an IVR channel perspective, and he previously served as a panelist on multi-channel interactions at Speechtek.