DialogCONNECTION Ltd is the brainchild of Dr. Maria Aretoulaki.

Maria has been working on speech recognition applications and Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) since 1996. She has specialised in user-centered and robust VUI design and adaptive repair strategies for mixed-initiative dialogues focusing on spontaneous speech (long phrases and whole sentences rather than just keywords), but also persona design and branding, scripting and copywriting, usability testing and application tuning for several industries and verticals, as well as languages, apart from acquiring considerable experience in People and Project Management.

She 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), independent Consultant through the Gerson Lehrman Group’s Councils of Technology Advisors (USA) and VoxGeneration (previously 8Hertz, Germany), EU Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), and 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-to-sms, catalogue ordering systems, telephone banking and Government Helplines. She has worked for industries as diverse as banking, telecomms, retail, and the British and German Government, and in many different countries from the British Isles, to Germany and Austria and to 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 has 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 authored several publications, including the Chapter on Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Oxford University Press textbook "Handbook of Computational Linguistics". She has served in many Advisory Committees for EU Dialogue-related projects and in the Review Panels of International Conferences and Scientific Journals, while she is also a member of a number of scientific societies.

Maria has got an extensive network of contacts to technology partners and providers in Industry, as well as in Academia, worldwide. As a result, she can always point you to additional experts for the timely and successful completion of your project.