I'm an engineering and executive consultant specializing in open standards telephony. I design voice and multimodal applications that solve unique business problems using technologies like VoiceXML/CCXML, VoIP, and SOA. My services include product design and specification, project management, technical due diligence, competitive analysis, and systems engineering. I've served in executive, engineering and R&D roles at various industry leaders such as Vocalocity, Nuance, AT&T and Lucent Technologies.

I work extensively in the technical standards activities of the VoiceXML Forum and Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C).  Judith Markowitz and I co-chair the Forum's Speaker Biometrics Committee where we focus on speaker verification and identification (SIV) for VoiceXML. I'm also chair of the VoiceXML Forum's Conformance Committee, where we run the VoiceXML platform certification program, standard test suite, and testing infrastructure to compare VoiceXML platforms, tools, and applications. For 2007, I'm an invited member of the Board of Directors, where I previously served as Chair (2006) and co-Chair (2005). 

In the W3C Voice Browser Working Group (VBWG), I'm a co-editor of VoiceXML 2.0 and VoiceXML 2.1 and VoiceXML 3.0; I design new telephony call control features as part of the Call Control subgroup and serve as a co-editor of CCXML 1.0. In 2001, Speech Technology Magazine's readers voted me as one of the 20 most influential people in the speech technology industry. I speak frequently at industry events such as SpeechTEK and VoiceCon.

For several years I was VP and Chief Architect at Vocalocity, Inc., a communications software company that specialized in software for telecom OEMs and service providers. I was responsible for Vocalocity's standards leadership and product architecture. As a Software Architect at Nuance Communications, I investigated architecture for the next-generation Voice Web and developed new VoiceXML features for NVP (nee VWS). I've worked as a consultant at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, NJ, where I designed new telephony features for VoiceXML, and led a project to demonstrate new VoIP-based telephone services for the AT&T Network. In 2000, I worked as CTO at Enuncia Communications (now defunct) where we built an innovative and robust VoiceXML server along with some cutting-edge tools.

I've been interested in telecommunications for many years. I was a Member of Technical Staff in the Software Production Research Department in the Communications Software Research Center of the Bell Laboratories Research division of Lucent Technologies from 1992 through 2000. In 1995 I helped build the first web-based telephony platform, PhoneWeb, programmed with what we called the Phone Markup Language (PML). Years later, I started the VoiceXML Forum in March 1999 with AT&T, IBM, and Motorola to develop a standard voice telephony markup language based on our research and products. On August 25, 1999, we released the first draft (0.9) of the VoiceXML specification.  On March 7, 2000, we announced the publication of the VoiceXML 1.0 specification. Soon thereafter, we submitted VoiceXML 1.0 to the W3C, which was formally acknowledged on May 22, 2000 when the W3C Voice Browser Working Group announced it had voted at its May 10-12 meeting in Paris to adopt VoiceXML 1.0 as the basis for the development of a W3C dialog markup language.

For more information about my work related to VoiceXML, see my list of external publications, talks, and patents. For a glimpse of the VoiceXML industry, see my World of VoiceXML site.