Alex Acero

Alex Acero is Distinguished Scientist at Zoom, heading AI Incubations. Until 2024, he was Senior Distinguished Engineer and Siri Chief Scientist at Apple, leading speech recognition, speech synthesis, and on-device language understanding for Siri, the first mainstream voice assistant. His team contributed to several Apple features including dictation, Voice Control for motor skills impaired users, screen readers for vision impaired users, and spoken navigation in CarPlay. Prior to joining Apple in 2013, he spent 20 years at Microsoft Research managing teams in speech, audio, multimedia, computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, machine learning, and information retrieval. His team at Microsoft Research shipped Bing Translator, contributed to Xbox Kinect and demonstrated the superiority of deep neural networks over mixtures of Gaussians for large vocabulary speech recognition, which helped jump-start the deep learning revolution. He is Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington.

Dr. Acero is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of IEEE, ISCA, AASF, and AAIS. He is the recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, the IEEE Norbert Wiener Society Award. He received best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and CIKM. Alex is author of the textbook “Spoken Language Processing”, over 230 technical papers and 160 US patents. Alex has served in the Board of Directors of IEEE and IEEE Foundation, and as President of IEEE Signal Processing Society. Besides the UW ECE Advisory Board, Alex serves in IDIAP’s International Advisory Council, Stony Brook University’s Industry Advisory Board, and previously served in boards including EPSRC Natural Speech Technology Advisory board and CMU College of Engineering. Alex received a PhD from Carnegie Mellon.