Voice Partners Expands European Presence with Two Top VUI Consultants

Voice Partners announces the addition of two top European VUI consultants to their international team: Stephen Mailey, formerly head of Consulting for Fluency (UK), and Diego Montefusco, formerly of Tiscali (Italy).

(PRWEB) January 28, 2005 -- Voice Partners today announced the addition of two top European VUI consultants to their international team: Stephen Mailey, formerly head of Consulting for Fluency (UK), and Diego Montefusco, formerly of Tiscali (Italy).

We are thrilled to have these two leading VUI designers setting the standards for speech in Europe, said Wally Brill, principle and co-founder of Voice Partners. Stephen Maileys expertise in telco, travel, utilities, and financial services, and his ground breaking efforts in VUI design and usability, have earned him the respect of the industry as a leading designer for speech. Diego Montefusco has always been a technical pioneer from his development of one of the first voice portals, later bought by Tiscali, to deploying speech systems in eight countries in Europe," he added.

Stephen Mailey was the head of Voice User Interface Design and Consulting at Fluency for the past four years. After graduating with the highest degree in Music from Trinity College Dublin in 1997, Stephen turned his focus to sound technologies and developed new AI techniques at Cambridge and Imperial College London.

For the past 4 years at Fluency his focus has been on Voice User Interface design optimization and insuring speech systems make the right impressions with their particular user group. Stephen has conducted research and empirical voice user interface analysis in the areas of dialogue design, mental modeling, the use of non-speech audio, persona and branding. At Fluency, Stephen designed numerous VUIs for travel, financial, retail, telecom and utilities companies throughout the UK, Europe and the US.

Diego Montefusco was one of the first journalists in the early 90s to promote the Internet to the public at large on the pages of "Virtual" magazine and at conferences throughout Italy. His articles covering human computer interaction were published all over the world including outlets in Japan, Brazil, the US, Australia and Germany, and at domestic and international conferences.

Following his work as product manager with the biggest Italian ISPs (Video Online and Telecom Italia Net), he moved to Silicon Valley to work for the Internet hardware company Teknema, which was later acquired by Ravisent Technologies.

In early 2000, he co-founded the San Francisco-based VoceViva, one of the first voice portal companies. After its acquisition by the pan-European ISP Tiscali, Diego single-handedly created the VUIs for numerous voice applications, including Tiscali by Phone, which was the largest deployment of a voice portal in Europe. Tiscali by Phone is currently available in eight countries and six languages.

About Voice Partners
http://www.voicepartners.com
Voice Partners is the Worlds leading User Experience Design consultancy, focused on end-to-end, cross-mode interactions...with particular focus on the primary contact device of the 21st century: the phone. Co-founders Melissa Dougherty and Wally Brill created the SWAT team of speech, bringing together the leaders in linguistics, voice user interface design, deployment and usability. Voice Partners takes a zero tolerance approach to compromised customer experience over-the-phone. Do it right or get the other guys!"

From its headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, and locations across North America, South America and Europe, Voice Partners works with Blue Chip clients who care about providing better over-the-phone customer service that reinforces their valuable brand image. Voice Partners is technology agnostic, and has designed systems using all major speech recognition engine providers and telephony platforms. For more information about Voice Partners, please visit www.voicepartners.com or contact Melissa Dougherty at 650-493-5866 info@voicepartners.com.

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