Isabella Villani has six years of experience in the field of Speech Recognition. She graduated from La Trobe University with a bachelor's degree in speech pathology, with a particular interest in linguistics, acoustics, phonetics, verbal and non verbal communication and psychology. Villani entered the IT industry in 2001, focusing on speech recognition technology for two of Australia’s largest speech vendors, Pracom and Dimension Data. Dimension Data has a presence in many countries and its global ‘Centre of Excellence’ in speech recognition is located in Australia. Dimension Data’s Voice User Interface (VUI) and Persona work for telecommunications clients such as Telstra and Vodafone has won Dimension Data and its clients international acclaim in two of the world’s most applauded speech forums, SpeechTEK and Conversations. Dimension Data’s Vodafone application won four awards at the 2005 SpeechTEK conference, plus the coveted ‘Global Best Practice’ award at Conversations. In Villani’s current role as a speech recognition consultant, she is involved in the complete speech recognition lifecycle from responding to tenders, requirements analysis, persona development, VUI design, usability, testing, deployment and tuning. She uses her knowledge and experience of user centred design principles and industry standards in dialogue, prompt and persona design when consulting in Voice User Interface (VUI) design. Villani is heavily involved in client education espousing the value of speech recognition technology, the speech recognition lifecycle, benefits of speech recognition to an organization, return on investment, relevant technologies and industry trends. Villani began her career as a speech pathologist working for ComTEC disability communication and technology solutions. She specialized in working with people with intellectual and physical disabilities. During her time at ComTEC, she was state training manager and a member of the editorial committee for the ‘AGOSCI News’ (Australian Group on Severe Communication Impairment), a quarterly journal distributed to members Australia wide. For two years, Villani was a Victorian branch executive member of Speech Pathology Australia, Victorian editor and publications and information technology portfolio leader. Villani obtained advertising interest in order to generate revenue, sourced articles and liaised with special interest groups, health professionals, consumers and members. She ensured Victorian publication deadlines were met for the National Stop Press (a monthly magazine distributed to members). Villani believes that the Australian market for speech recognition is growing fast, and clients are now clearly seeing the benefits of speech. Vendors are able to demonstrate the benefits of speech recognition improving customer experience, workforce optimization, market differentiation and return on investment.