Walter Rolandi, Ph.D., has over 20 years of experience in applied artificial intelligence. He has developed and deployed expert systems for Blue Cross and Blue Shield, NCR Corporation (both in Columbia, S.C., and in Milan, Italy) and Horizon Research, Inc. (A Mitsubishi R&D company). Areas of research have included expert systems, knowledge engineering methodology, machine learning, speaker independent continuous speech recognition, text-to-speech technologies and conversational dialog systems.

Before founding The Voice User Interface Company, LLC, Rolandi was the Director of Applied Research for Conita Technologies, Inc., a speech application and platform company. There, he was responsible for the definition and evaluation of the "user experience." Additionally, his duties included the creation and incorporation of new methods and technologies to enhance the intelligence of Conita's Personal Virtual Assistants. Avaya acquired the company in early 2002.

Since the late nineties, Dr. Rolandi has been very active in the speech community, speaking at a number of academic and commercial speech technology conferences around the world. In addition to numerous other publications and presentations, Dr. Rolandi writes a regular column for Speech Technology Magazine called The Human Factor.