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. She has specialised in user-centred and 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 branding, scripting and copywriting, usability testing and application tuning for several industries and verticals, as well as languages. In addition to her technical expertise, Maria has also acquired considerable experience in People and Project Management for Speech projects.

Maria has held positions with several players in the speech industry: 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, Germany); as an EU Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), and a VUI Designer at Clarity AG (Germany), me2me (Switzerland), Intervoice (now Convergys), Vicorp and JamIP (UK).

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

Originally from Greece, Maria has spent the last two decades between the UK and Germany, and speaks English, German, and Greek fluently, while she is also proficient in French.

Maria holds a BA (Hons) in Linguistics & English from The University of Athens (Greece), an MSc in Machine Translation and a PhD in Language Engineering from The University of Manchester (UK) and she has also held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship on Spoken Dialogue Management at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 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". Moreover, she has served in many Advisory Committees for EU Dialogue-related projects and in the Review Panels of International Conferences and Scientific Journals in Computer Science and Language and Speech Processing, and she is also a member of a number of scientific, business and digital societies. Recently, 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.

Maria has got an extensive network of contacts to technology partners and providers in Industry, as well as in Academia, worldwide. As a result, you could always be pointed to additional experts for the timely and successful completion of your project. For instance, we are working together with the IVR Design Group (IDG) in the US, a communications technology consultancy that provides professional services related to IVR Design and development. DialogCONNECTION is the European IDG partner, catering for application design and development for the British English, the German, the French and the Greek languages.