Bio

I founded Thought Machine in 2014 because I wanted to bring modern software technology to banking. I strongly felt something needed to be done about the way most banking systems were so cumbersome and awkward, not to mention deeply frustrating and practically useless for millions of end users. We discovered this after originally setting out to make intuitive banking apps based on advanced machine learning and then hitting a brick wall time after time when attempting to integrate or get proper data feeds. Our conclusion was that we should build our own core banking platform from scratch and encourage our customers to scrap their archaic technology. I am a serial entrepreneur, with expertise in speech, natural language and machine learning. From 2010-2013 I led the text-to-speech team at Google, developing speech output technology for Google Now, driving directions in Google maps and accessibility. If you hear any Google product speak, that's the system my team built. I joined Google upon the acquisition of Phonetic Arts, a company I co-founded and was CEO. We developed text-to-speech and other speech technology for the computer games industry. Prior to that I was co-founder and CTO of Rhetorical Systems which was acquired by Nuance in 2004. I have been an academic at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities. At Edinburgh I was director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research.