Mike Phillips (Speech Recognition)

Michael "Mike" Phillips (born August 1, 1961) is the CEO and co-founder of Sense Labs and a pioneer in machine learning, including mobile speech recognition and text-to-speech technology.

Phillips was a student in electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He was also a researcher for Carnegie Mellon and then a research scientist at the Spoken Language Systems group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he helped to develop VOYAGER, an “urban navigation and exploration system” that could recognize and interpret basic spoken queries. VOYAGER was one of the first research systems to combine speech recognition and natural language processing to have a conversation with a user.

In 1994, Phillips co-founded and became CTO of Boston-based SpeechWorks, which became one of the leading US-based vendors of speech recognition technology at the time, alongside Nuance Communications and IBM. The startup developed interactive voice response systems, including call-center interfaces for clients including Amtrak and FedEx. SpeechWorks’ technology worked for call-center interfaces because the customer could verbally answer questions posed by the human-sounding speech recognition program, rather than navigating through a menu. The technology also had time-saving “barge-in” capabilities, meaning that a customer could interrupt the system before it finished offering the full list of options. The system could also “learn.” It kept a record of names or phrases customers had used in the past so that it could learn to understand names and phrases that slightly differed from its original vocabulary.

SpeechWorks’ value more than tripled after its initial public offering, and it was acquired by ScanSoft in 2003. While Phillips was CTO at ScanSoft, he worked on technologies across the company’s products, including the leading dictation software Dragon NaturallySpeaking. ScanSoft then acquired Nuance Communications in 2005, and adopted the latter’s name.

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