DialogCONNECTION Ltd is the brainchild of Dr. Maria Aretoulaki.

Maria has been working on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications and Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) since 1996. In fact, she is one of about two dozen "real" VUI Designers in the world! She has specialised in user-centred but robust VUI design, and adaptive repair strategies for mixed-initiative dialogues, focusing on spontaneous speech (i.e. long phrases and whole sentences rather than just keywords). She has also been working on persona design and dialogue scripting, usability testing and application tuning for several industries and languages. In addition to her technical expertise, Maria has also acquired considerable experience in People and Project Management for Speech application development projects.

Maria has held positions with several speech application providers: She has been Head of Speech Design at Vicorp (UK), Head of Dialogue Development at SemanticEdge (Germany), Project Manager at the Bavarian Research Centre for Knowledge-based Systems (FORWISS) and one of the founders of the spinoff company Sympalog (both in Germany). She has also worked as an independent Consultant through the Gerson Lehrman Group’s Councils of Technology Advisors (US) and VoxGen (previously 8Hertz, in Germany); as an EU Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), and as a VUI Designer at Intervoice (now Convergys - UK and US) and at Clarity AG (Germany). Recently, she has been involved in DialogCONNECTION projects with Raytheon / BBN Technologies and Apple (US),  VoxGen, JamIP and Absence Manager (UK),  me2me (Switzerland), and Omilia (Greece).

Maria has designed voice-enabled or speech-activated services as diverse as telephone banking systems, Government Helplines, shop locators, and voice diallers. She has worked for industries as diverse as Banking, Telecom, Retail, and the British and German Governments, and in many different countries from the British Isles, to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Greece, and the US.

Originally from Greece, Maria has spent the last two decades between the UK and Germany, and speaks English, German, French and Greek fluently.

Maria holds a BA (Hons) in Linguistics & English from The University of Athens (Greece), an MSc in Machine Translation and a PhD in Automatic Text Summarisation from the University of Manchester (UK). She has also held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship on Spoken Dialogue Management at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany) funded by the EU Human Capital Mobility Programme.

She has (co-)authored several publications, including the Chapter on Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Oxford University Press textbook "Handbook of Computational Linguistics". She has served in several Advisory Committees for dialogue-related projects and in the Review Panels of International Conferences and Scientific Journals in Computer Science, and Language & Speech Processing. She is also a member of a number of scientific, business and digital societies. In the past few years, Maria has been contributing to the SpeechTEK specialist Conference with presentations on VUI Design issues and Best Practices, topics that she also discusses in her Wordpress Blog.

In May 2011, Maria co-chaired the Workshop on "Cross-linguistic & Cross-cultural Voice Interaction Design" organised by the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) and the Applied Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS). She presented the results of the workshop at SpeechTEK Europe 2011 in London the following day, where she was also one of the “5 global speech tech experts” taking part in the Meet the Consultants Clinic.