A few episodes back, Machine Yearning brought you a series of conversations from the VOICE conference. With over 2000 attendees at the largest gathering of the conversational technology world, VOICE was intense. You heard from voice and machine learning powerhouses like Cathy Pearl from Google and Patricia Scanlon, who has built a natural language data set from over a million samples of children under 12.

Now, we’re excited to present another individual with profound Natural Language Processing experience: Dr. Deborah Dahl. Deborah has been at the forefront of voice and speech, multimodal and accessibility standards design on the web for over 30 years. Her view on this space, and her sense of humor about it all, is fantastic. These days, Deborah is the Principal behind Conversational Technologies, a company that focuses on new, disruptive applications of speech and language technologies.

Let’s dive in, mid-conversation, where we asked Deborah to fill us in in some of her most recent projects and she wowed us on the breadth of what’s happening in speech-driven technology.