Trace Wax

Current

• Co-founder / VP Products and Services at Talk2Us

Past

• User Interface Design Leader at Nuance Communications
• Principal Consultant / Owner at Trace Wax & Associates (Sole Proprietorship)
• Project Leader at Nuance

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Education

• Stanford University

Connections

277 connections

Industry

Telecommunications

Trace Wax’s Summary

I'm an experienced Speech Interface Architect who until recently worked for Nuance(formerly Scansoft/SpeechWorks). Currently, I'm a co-founder of a speech recognition & telecommunications startup.

Before Nuance, I worked for two years as an independent contractor, with clients such as Yahoo, Sun, Voicecom, and The Voice Internet. Before that, I spent 3 years as a Project Leader at "Legacy Blue" Nuance in Menlo Park, CA, and have speech interface design and development experience at Microsoft as well.

My goals are to continue developing visionary speech interfaces and reusable componenets, and to continue deploying successful and well-liked customer speech applications.

I also want to help encourage greater use of speech recognition technology by non-profit groups, to use my skills and technology background to help community service projects and people in need.

Trace Wax’s Specialties:

Speech interface design, spec writing, audio production, voice talent coaching, voice branding and persona, speech application grammar writing and tuning, project and customer management, programming (Java, JSP, VoiceXML), entrepreneurship and all things startup!

Trace Wax’s Experience

• Co-founder / VP Products and Services

  Talk2Us

  (Telecommunications industry)

  October 2007 — Present (1 year 1 month)

  • Designed and implemented a speech-enabled virtual PBX, with conferencing and unified communications features. Defined the product as reusable components that can be provided individually or as a whole to IP PBX makers and consumer VoIP services. Determined requirements, wrote the VUI using Visio and XML, and implemented it in VoiceXML, JSP, and Java. Wrote the grammars using JSP and GRXML. Served as the original voice talent, and postprocessed and catalogued the prompts.
  • Co-wrote the original business plan and performed business development tasks.

• User Interface Design Leader

  Nuance Communications

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; NUAN; Telecommunications industry)

  2003 — 2007 (4 years)

  • High-quality interaction design, user interface design, and dialog and callflow design for speech application deployments.
  • Creation of modular, reusable, well-architected voice user interface products and components.
  • Production of voice prompts, including personality design, prompt writing and editing, voice coaching, sound engineering, and prompt management.
  • Speech application tuning and grammar development.
  • Project leadership and customer management.
  • Designing and executing usability studies and other user research.
  • Speech application development and rapid prototyping using VoiceXML, Java, and JSP.
  • Graphical and multi-modal user interface design.

• Principal Consultant / Owner

  Trace Wax & Associates (Sole Proprietorship)

  (Sole Proprietorship; 1-10 employees; Telecommunications industry)

  May 2001 — May 2003 (2 years 1 month)

  Principal Consultant / Owner, San Francisco, CA
  • Expert Voice User Interface Consulting and Project Management. Clients include:
  Sun Microsystems, Human Factors Engineer, Santa Clara, CA
  • Voice-enabled Sun’s Portal, Messaging, Directory, Calendar, and Awareness Servers. Designed speech applications including a voice portal, e-mail reader, address book, calendar, and buddy list.
  • Designed dialogs and wrote design specifications using Word, Excel, Visio, and Microsoft Access.
  TeleCenter, Voice Recognition Engineer, Los Angeles, CA
  • Designed and implemented innovative call routing and virtual assistant applications.
  • Performed project management and business development.
  • Assisted with the service design, web design, business plan, and Telecom architecture.
  GMVoices, Inc., Creative Director, Alpharetta, GA
  • Selected and coached voice talent, created voice brands and application

• Project Leader

  Nuance

  (Public Company; 201-500 employees; NUAN; Telecommunications industry)

  May 1998 — April 2001 (3 years)

  Project Leader, Dialog Research and Development Group
  • Designed state-of-the-art voice user interfaces for Nuance's voice browser, voice portal-in-a-box, and voice instant messenger, and for several customer projects.
  • Led cross-functional teams, managed customer projects, created and tracked project schedules, and led a software development team.
  • Developed the initial implementation of Nuance’s Voyager voice browser using Java, VoxML, and Nuance SpeechObjects.
  • Contributed key elements to many advanced dialog initiatives, including voice browsing, multi-modal voice browsing, natural and complex mixed-initiative dialogs, reusable voice user interface components, and just-in-time instruction. Co-authored two patents.
  Software Engineer, Applications Group
  • Designed high-quality speech application dialogs and callflows, wrote and produced voice prompts, coached voice talent, wrote grammars, and developed software prototypes and demos.

Trace Wax’s Education

• Stanford University

Additional Information

Trace Wax’s Groups:

NYCGMC, OneTaste, NYC Web 2.0 Meetup, eComm

Trace Wax’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch