Volker Jantzen holds degrees in business administration and computer science. His research field at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology comprised text-to-speech, speech recognition and computer linguistics, a field he had also pursued while working at IBM. In 1999, Jantzen cofounded Intelliact. By the end of 2001, when he left the company to fully focus on SVOX’s potential, Intelliact had emerged as the Swiss market leader for product data management (PDM) consulting. Jantzen has been heading SVOX since April 2000. As founder and CEO, he is the entrepreneurial visionary who drove the company from academia to the commercial marketplace. Under his guidance, SVOX has become the premier provider of embedded TTS solutions. In particular, SVOX is the leading provider of TTS to the automotive industry in Europe. The company’s list of customers comprises many household names such as Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler and Nissan. Jantzen is frequently invited as guest speaker at leading conferences to share his opinion about the evolution of speech interfaces in automotive and mobile devices. Key to this success was Jantzen’s thorough understanding of technology, along with his sense for true customer needs.