Alex Acero

Alex Acero is AI Venture Partner at Cadenza Capital, and a consultant to startups in AI. Until 2024, he was Senior Distinguished Engineer and Siri Chief Scientist at Apple, leading speech recognition, speech synthesis, language understanding, and dialog for Siri, Apple’s personal assistant. His team contributed to features such as 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. 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 is author of the textbook “Spoken Language Processing”, over 230 technical papers and 160 US patents. Alex 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.