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Simonie Wilson

@simoniewilson

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Conversational AI leader specializing in VUI design and team building.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek leadership roles in conversational AI where I can build and mentor teams, drive VUI strategy, and deliver user-centered voice/chat products in innovative, collaborative environments.

I am a conversational AI and voice user interface (VUI) leader with 31 years of design, tuning and management experience across corporate, start-up, academic and government settings. I build and manage teams, create IVR and chatbot call flows, and deliver production-ready conversational products through rapid prototyping, iterative usability testing and data-driven tuning.

My work includes leading UX Conversational AI teams at Allstate, founding and growing VUI teams at Pindrop, and extensive independent consulting and product work across healthcare, banking, retail and enterprise systems. I evangelize conversation design, create best practices and documentation, present at industry conferences, and have a patent in dialog design and messaging.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

UX Conversational AI Manager

Current

Allstate Insurance

Apr 2021 - Present (4 years 8 months)

Lead UX Conversational AI team designing voice, chat and SMS virtual assistants, delivering best-in-class conversational experiences and operationalizing design practices across business stakeholders. Managed team performance, hiring, and cross-functional strategy while improving conversational design processes.

Conversation Design IVR Voice Experience Team Management Information Architecture Stakeholder Management Usability

Principal VUI Designer

Pindrop Security

Jun 2017 - Apr 2021 (3 years 10 months)

Established and managed the VUI Design team, created authentication product demos, and standardized VUI best practices to improve IVR and call center security and customer experience. Supported sales and product teams with call flow documentation and UAT.

IVR Authentication Usability Testing Documentation Cross Functional Collaboration

Senior VUI Designer

Digital Data Voice

Jun 2012 - Jun 2017 (5 years)

Created VUI designs, tuning documents, prompts and grammars for healthcare, banking, retail and utility IVR systems; conducted tunings, unit testing and presented findings to customers to improve recognition and UX.

VUI Tuning Grammar IVR Usability Testing Transcription

Owner / Cupcake Manager

Three Girls Cupcakes

Jan 2010 - Jul 2013 (3 years 6 months)

Founded and operated a mobile cupcakery overseeing baking, marketing, payroll and sales, tripling profits year two and doubling again year three before selling the business; donated 10% of profits to local charities.

Small Business Management Marketing Payroll Sales Event Vending Social Media

VUI Designer Consultant

Independent Consulting

May 2010 - Jun 2012 (2 years 1 month)

Provided voice user interface design, tuning and dialog specification services for multiple clients, rewriting flows, transcribing calls and delivering tuning reports and recommendations to engineering and product teams.

Consulting Dialog Specs Tuning Reports Visio Client Communication

Speech Scientist - Tuning

Intervoice

Jan 2008 - May 2010 (2 years 4 months)

Performed speech recognition tuning, grammar development (GRXML, SLM, VXML), data collection and analysis to optimize application performance and provided consultative advice to customers on advanced speech recognition functions.

Speech Recognition GRXML VXML Data Analysis P Tuning Transcription

VUI Practice Manager

Open Methods

Jan 2007 - Jan 2008 (1 year)

Created VUI best practices, evaluated dialog design tools, and designed/tuned IVR flows while directing releases and maintaining internal knowledge resources to productize tuning tools.

IVR Design Tool Evaluation P Tuning Visio

Software Development Engineer

Microsoft

Nov 1999 - Jul 2003 (3 years 8 months)

Developed and tuned interactive speech and multimodal dialogs, built rapid prototypes in JScript and VoiceXML, and contributed dialog standards and usability expertise for shipped features including MSN Messenger integrations.

VoiceXML Prototyping Usability Studies Dialog Standards Speech.NET Search Companion

Project Engineer

Entropic

Mar 1999 - Nov 1999 (8 months)

Built and tuned customized interactive dialog systems, performed overall system and dialogue specification, grammar design and testing using in-house tools and TCL coding for corporate clients.

Tcl Testing System Integration Dialogue Specification Custom Solutions

Member of Technical Staff

Raytheon Systems Company

Jun 1993 - Mar 1999 (5 years 9 months)

Designed and programmed large-scale, database-intensive information systems and prototyped speech and language interfaces for applications including in-car spoken language systems and enterprise speech testbeds.

Software Design Rapid Prototyping NLP Speech Technology HCI Performance Management

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Georgetown University

Master of Science, Computational Linguistics

1996 - 1999

Activities and societies: Hughes Aircraft Company Fellows Master of Science program (1996–1999); masters research implemented in tools used by Entropic and Microsoft.

Completed a Master of Science in Computational Linguistics with research applied to speech and dialog tools used in industry.