Barbara Heuft

Experience

• 

  University of Bonn

  Mar 1993 - Feb 1998

  Lecturer & Researcher

  - research on prosody and other phonetic topics- speech synthesis- fundraising from third parties

• 

  Lernout and Hauspie Speech Products

  Feb 1996 - Feb 1998

  Language Specialist

  - work on pronunciations for speech synthesis and speech recognition- German speech synthesis

• 

  Philips Speech Processing GmbH

  Mar 1998 - Jan 2002

  Language Development Manager

  Responsible for a team developing language specific parts of speech recognition systems.

• 

  Nuance Communications

  May 2003 - Jul 2023

  Lead Speech Scientist in several large customer projects, responsible for data collection and transcription, training of tailored language models, acoustic model adaptation. At the same time working closely with customers on dialog design and data labeling. On several multilingual projects responsible for creating speech recognition grammars and training language models.

  • Manager Conversation Experience Design

    Mar 2021 - Jul 2023

  • Principal Speech Scientist

    Nov 2009 - Feb 2021

  • Senior Speech Scientist

    May 2003 - Oct 2009
• 

  Microsoft

  Aug 2023 - now

  Senior Manager - Conversational AI Design

  Leading a team creating chatbot and voice solutions and helping customers to develop and deploy AI solutions in a call center context.