Alex Acero

Alex Acero is Sr. Director at Apple leading speech recognition, speech synthesis, language understanding, and dialog for Siri, Apple’s personal assistant for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Carplay, Macintosh, and HomePod. 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 built Bing Translator, contributed to Xbox Kinect, and pioneered the use of deep learning in large vocabulary speech recognition. From 1991-1993 he managed the speech team for Spain’s Telefonica. His first stint at Apple started in 1990. He is Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington.

Dr. Acero is a Fellow of IEEE and ISCA. He received the 2017 Norbert Wiener Society Award, the 2013 Best Paper Award, and the 2006 Distinguished Lectureship from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Alex received an engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, a Masters from Rice University, and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Alex is author of the textbook “Spoken Language Processing”, over 250 technical papers and 150 US patents. Alex has served in a number of advisory boards, including IDIAP’s International Advisory Council, Stony Brook University’s Industry Advisory Board, and EPSRC Natural Speech Technology Advisory board.