SpinVox Appoints David Thomson as SVP for Speech Technology

Top US Voice Specialist and Former Lucent Speech Solutions CTO Joins World’s Biggest Commercial Speech Research Group

SpinVox, a global leader in voice to content messaging, has appointed David L. Thomson as senior vice president for Speech Technology. Reporting to SpinVox CTO, Philip Marnick, he will be based in the U.S. and charged with building relationships with technology centers in North America.

Thomson has 24 years of experience in the speech technology and telecommunications business covering a broad range of technology development, network engineering, and business development roles.

During his career, he has been responsible for software and hardware research and development for over a dozen large-scale, voice-activated services and has 10 patents and 30 papers published.

Thomson worked for 18 years for AT&T/Lucent. He was CTO for Lucent Speech Solutions and was responsible for developing the speech technology behind systems that have handled over 10 billion calls.

These included: Voice call routing services for Spanish Telefonica, BT, and AT&T, handling several million calls per day; a voice-activated corporate calling card service used by over 800 companies and a voice activated service used by AOL MovieFone (777-FILM) to provide show times and sell theatre tickets. He also served as Lucent’s representative on the VoiceXML Forum board of directors.

Subsequent to Lucent Speech Solutions, he served as CTO of Salt Lake City-based Fonix Corporation in charge of technical planning and strategy development for network-based and embedded/handheld speech systems.

He joins SpinVox from Lake Forest, CA-based SpeechPhone, where, as CTO, he managed development for intelligent VoIP telecommunication services and innovative speech services.

“Christina Domecq, SpinVox co-founder and CEO, says, “SpinVox has already assembled the world’s biggest commercial speech research team attracting luminaries such as Professor Phil Woodland and Dr. Tony Robinson to our Cambridge-based Advanced Speech Group and with people of David’s calibre joining the company we will confirm the dominant position of SpinVox as it powers a growing range of network services for telecommunications carriers worldwide.“

Thomson is currently chairman of the VoiceXML Forum Tools Committee, a cross-industry group with 60 member companies developing standards for application development software.

Thomson was awarded BSEE and MSEE degrees from Brigham Young University.

About SpinVox

SpinVox® is the world’s largest privately-held speech technology company, providing the most successful voice to text messaging services which are used daily by millions of people. SpinVox services are available directly on www.spinvox.com and through leading carriers and service providers globally.

Through significant innovations in voice and network technologies, SpinVox has brought together the two most natural forms of communication – voice and text – to create the fastest-growing form of messaging: Voice-to-Content™.

Its award-winning service is not only upgrading voicemail – by converting voicemail to text for delivery as SMS or email messages – but is also empowering people to speak SMS messages or emails to anyone, from any phone. SpinVox also enables people to speak messages directly to their favorite web messaging services such as Facebook, Twitter and many other popular web networks.

As a carrier-class hosted service provider, any network, anywhere in the world can rapidly implement SpinVox and it is now live with Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile and Livejournal and has announced a deal with Skype.

At the heart of SpinVox is its ground-breaking Voice Message Conversion System™ (VMCS), which works by combining state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process.

Contacts

For Media Enquiries:
SpinVox
Jane Henry, + 44 7941 941 794
Global PR Director
Jane.henry {at} spinvox(.)com
or
GK Communications for SpinVox
Greg Kalish, +1 516-665-3292
gkalish {at} gkcomms(.)com