A SXSW Interactive 2016 panel submission

1. HAL to Her:
Humanizing Tech Via the Power of Voice
A SXSW Interactive 2016 Submission
Featuring Distinguished & Seasoned Speakers From:

2. WHAT IS THIS PANEL ABOUT?
Voice is powerful. Voice is human. From Amazon Echo to Cortana
to a real life Star Trek communicator badge – technology has
finally begun to find its voice. Hear from a panel of experts as they
speak about how advances in AI and hardware will transform the
way we interact with the people and devices around us.
For decades, sci-fi fantasies have outlined a voice activated future
where people interact seamlessly with the world around them, not
a future where we all stare down at screens. As we move into a
more tech enabled society, come hear how screens will fade to the
background as voice takes the lead.

3. WHAT WILL I LEARN?
• How close we are to a world activated by seamless voice
interaction
• Why it has been so difficult to perfect the voice
experience
• How some of the brightest companies are approaching
the challenge of voice communication – and how far they
have come thus far
• Which markets will be impacted the most by better voice
technology

4. Moderator: Brady Forest – VP, Highway1
Brady is Vice President at Highway1,
PCH’s incubator program. A prolific
speaker and maker on the geek scene,
Brady can be found at speaking
engagements around the world, inventing
new forms of transportation at Burning
Man, or creating in the Highway1 San
Francisco workshop. Additionally, Brady
writes for O’Reilly Radar, tracking changes
in technology. Brady is the founder of
Ignite, a geek event which has spread to
over a hundred cities worldwide.

5. Panelist: Jesse Robbins – CEO &
Founder, Orion
A technology infrastructure expert with a
background in emergency response,
Jesse is working to bring the power of
voice communication back to the
consumer. Jesse’s inspiration for Orion
came from his work as an EMT and
firefighter, where he realized the power of
real-time and heads-up communication.
Prior to Orion, Jesse founded Chef
(formerly Opscode) and is widely
recognized for transforming the way
companies like Facebook, Google and
Yahoo manage complex internet systems.
Before Chef, Jesse served as Amazon’s
“Master of Disaster,” where he was
responsible for website availability. He
also founded the Velocity Conference and
helped start the DevOps movement.

6. Panelist: Lesley Carmichael – Principal
Program Manager, Microsoft
Lesley Carmichael, Ph.D. is a Principal Program
Manager Lead at Microsoft, focused on
language expansion scalability. Her team is
responsible for delivering the tools and
technology to efficiently expand speech
recognition and text-to-speech synthesis
development across dozens of languages in
multiple products and scenarios. Lesley joined
Microsoft in 2006, and has shipped speech
components in multiple Microsoft products
including Windows, Exchange, XBOX Kinect,
and Windows Phone 7. Lesley holds a Ph.D. in
Linguistics from the University of Washington,
and she has applied her expertise in linguistics,
phonetics and prosody to Microsoft’s SR and
TTS development and human-computer
communication research.

7. Panelist: Timothy Jordan – Senior
Developer Advocate, Google
Timothy is a Senior Developer Advocate at
Google for Project Glass. He previously held the
same role for Google+, helping to launch
multiple plugins and APIs including the +1
button and Google+ History. He has taught
broadcasting, theater, engineering and various
forms of new media at the University of
California at Santa Cruz, the Academy of Art
University and the Digital Media Academy. He
has a B.S. in Computer Engineering, a Theater
Arts graduate degree and an M.F.A in Digital
Arts and New Media from U.C. Santa Cruz. In
his spare time he announces for the Santa Cruz
Derby Girls and the Silicon Valley Roller Girls.