A multi-hyphenate living in Silicon Valley, MICHAEL ATKINSON is a restaurant technology investor, entrepreneur, and strategic advisor to brands, investors, investment banks, and technology innovators worldwide. Michael is a serial entrepreneur, investment banker, restaurant operator and former restaurant chain CFO. He founded FohBoh.com, inFOH.com, Resttech, and most recently Orderscape.com, a voice technology software company that has built a voice search platform to enable food and restaurant discovery using digital assistants and mobile voice platforms.

Michael is a business accelerator mentor at bluestartups.com and foodandcity.org and former advisor to Creator. As a former restaurant operator and current advocate for transformative food and restaurant technologies, Michael helps restaurant brands and technology companies on matters relating to conversational commerce, automation, analytics, restaurant technology and strategy. He is a frequent writer and speaker on restaurant automation, conversational commerce, and data integration topics.

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BRANDON KAPLAN is the Founder of SKILLED, an emerging technology creative agency headquartered in NYC. Obsessed with technology throughout his life, Brandon founded SKILLED with the mission to bend emerging technologies creatively. SKILLED develops best in class VOICE experiences for Fortune 500 brands including PepsiCo and Starbucks. SKILLED treats conversational interfaces as a true omni-channel platform, ready to be leveraged by brands in order to drive engagement, conversion, and transactions.

NOELLE LaCHARITE is an evangelist at heart. She is passionate about Mindful Leadership, work-life harmony, and empowering people to achieve their potential through emerging technology. She also specializes in helping brands develop skills for Amazon Alexa. Noelle is co-founder of a skill development company, Voice Skills Inc. She has spent many years as a trainer, architect, and evangelist for IBM, RedHat, EMC, Amazon, and now Microsoft. She has taught thousands of people the value and importance of voice technology, democratizing AI, and mindful leadership.

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MIKE McEVOY is CEO of VoiceSell, where he is leading the development of a new generation of commerce-oriented voice solutions that can instantly add voice interactivity to any online store on mobile and desktop devices. Mike has been a change agent at a number of agile startups, as well as at Johnson & Johnson as CIO, and as CTO at Adobe Systems, where he was responsible for such products as Photoshop, Premier, and After Effects. Other experience includes blockchain (Liquineq), mobile messaging (VoiceSell, Cola, Scayl, and SView), IoT (Streetline), imaging and video (Adobe), Enterprise (Deem, Icarian, Confluent, ArborText), and Social Platforms (J&J / BabyCenter, Cola).

BRADLEY METROCK is CEO of Nashville-based Score Publishing, which helps creators find voice. Bradley founded podcast network VoiceFirst.FM, hosts the popular show This Week In Voice, published the audiobook Perspectives on Gender in #VoiceFirst Technology, produces the company's series of VoiceFirst Events, and founded the industry association VoiceFirst.Community. Quoted by organizations as diverse as The Mayo Clinic to Voicebot.AI, and cited as a top voice and AI influencer, Bradley has become a leading figure of the #VoiceFirst movement.

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TOM MONTELIONE, Ph.D., serves as Founder and President of Agile Audio Dashboards, whose work has won two Ohio Travel Association Ruby Awards, first in 2012 as well as the 2018 “Innovation in Travel Marketing Award.” Tom’s duties include being a business analyst, programmer, and project manager for various B2B and B2C websites and online ordering systems.

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CHRIS O’DELL is a member of the connected home team at Parks Associates, authoring reports on the privacy and security needs in the home and tracking various smart home product markets. He also contributes to the firm’s custom research work across all connected home markets. Chris joined Parks Associates following a six-year career in journalism. He graduated from Harding University in Searcy, AR, with a BA in broadcast journalism and a concentration on print journalism, where he served as the sports editor for The Bison, an award-winning student publication.

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RAY PIKUS is Co-Founder and President of Voice Dry Cleaner. Ray studied Natural Sciences at Ohio State University while attending Hack Night, much like Steve Jobs and Homebrew. There he met Pat Sweetman and a handful of dedicated engineers. And thus the Voice First Tech team was born, now innovating the voice industry with patience and accelerating public adoption with eager UX testing. 

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BRENDAN ROBERTS, an experienced startup and scaleup entrepreneur, is the Founder and CEO of Aider, the Digital Assistant for SMBs. Brendan enjoys working in the tech space, specifically in SaaS, AI, NLP, and Voice Tech solutions. Currently living in New Zealand, Brendan previously lived in the UK for 10 years but is originally from South Africa.

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PAT SWEETMAN is Co-Founder and CEO of Voice First Tech and Voice Dry Cleaner. After working at Amazon on the AWS IoT team, Patrick continued developing Alexa Skills and Actions on the Google Assistant. Today he works with his team to enable dry cleaning business owners to create a fast and worry-free experience into the age of #voicefirst

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JEREMY WILKEN, Host of Design for Voice,  is a software architect with primary skills in building scalable web applications in containerized environments. He is also a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, Angular, and the Google Assistant. His key interests are in how users and technology intersect, and how to ensure the best experiences by crafting full stack services and applications built to modern standards. As AI and new devices and interactions appear, he is exploring how to incorporate these new tools into products and experiences. The author of Ionic in Action, Jeremy is currently working on his second book, Angular in Action. He believes that voice computing is fundamental and essential to the future of computing and society.

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DANA YOUNG is Founder and CEO of Virtual Concierge Service. Receiving an Amazon Echo as a gift in 2015, Dana was inspired with the thought of delivering a virtual concierge service with Alexa and began developing this new skill for his own vacation rental. Soon realizing the opportunity to give Alexa this skill for any vacation rental property, he developed a web portal by which vacation rental owners and managers could enter their own content, and Alexa would deliver it. The Virtual Concierge Service was born in January 2017 as a service that enables vacation rental homeowners to use Alexa and Google Home to deliver personal concierge-like advice and information to enhance their guest’s experience.