Speech Heads, the speech stars are going to be out for the NY/NJ/CT AVIOS Local Chapter Meeting, on June, 17th.

Hosted at Microsoft NYC, this not-to-be-missed speech gala is being billed as a mini-Voice Search, San Diego (which, if you didn’t make it, was absolutely kickin’). The Chapter Meeting will include abbreviated versions of talks given in San Diego by some of the speakers local to the Tri-State Area.

The affair will feature:

• SpeechCycle CTO Roberto Pieraccini’s elocution on Multi-Modal/Multi-Channel Enterprise Voice Search: The Future of Customer Care;
• Executive Director of Speech Research at AT&T Jay Wilpon’s talk, Mash it up! – A speech mashup framework for mobile voice search;
• Google Senior Staff Engineer Johan Schalkwyk’s thoughts on the Challenges and solutions in voice search technology; and
• The Council of Senior Centers and Services of NY’s Technology Analyst, Michael Greene speechifying on matters of Enhancing accessibility and personalization through senior friendly design.

You’ll find them all from 6:30 – 8:30 pm, Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at Microsoft in NYC, the Palace Room, 1290 Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue), New York, NY 10104-0101.

To register email: info@avois.org

P.S. If you’re still on the fence (like my brother Adam B.), then check out these impressive bios:

• Roberto Pieraccini, Chief Technology Officer at SpeechCycle, uses his broad advanced speech research experience to assist creating the world’s most advanced phone-based speech product with continuous innovation in data-driven machine leaning for interactive systems. He has worked at prestigious research labs such as CSELT, Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, and IBM T.J. Watson Research, led an R&D team at SpeechWorks, and he has written more than 100 papers and articles.

• Johan Schalkwyk has worked in the Speech Industry for over 15 years. Johan is the one of principal architects behind the Google Speech Recognizer, and spearheaded the push for open ended speech recognition for mobile devices. Google VoiceSearch is the culmination of these efforts.

• Jay Wilpon is Executive Director of Speech Research at AT&T. He is the leader for many innovative voice enabled services, including the world’s first spoken language understanding service – AT&T’s “How May I Help You”. Altogether, Jay’s work has resulted in billions of dollars of savings and revenue growth. He has authored over 90 publications, and was honored as IEEE Fellow and AT&T Fellow for his work in speech technologies and services

• Michael Greene had the good fortune of being laid off from the company he’d worked at for two decades, five years ago. He went back to school for a masters in social work and now works directly with children, consults on technology for senior-service organizations, and often ponders and occasionally publishes about better human-computer interfaces.