Roberto Pieraccini is a technology expert in the fields of speech recognition, natural language, dialog, and human-machine interaction. He worked as a researcher at CSELT (Torino, Italy), Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ), AT&T Shannon Laboratories (Florham Park, NJ), SpeechWorks International (now Nuance), and IBM T.J. Watson Research (Yorktown Heights, NY). In 2005 he accepted the position of Chief Technology Officer at SpeechCycle, a company specializing in sophisticated technical support systems based on voice recognition technology. In 2012-2013 he was the director and CEO of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), at Berkeley, CA. He was the Director of Advanced Conversational Technology at Jibo, Inc. He is now at Google Switzerland as a Director of Engineering for the Google Assistant. He is the author of “The Voice in the Machine: Building Computers that Understand Speech,” published by MIT Press, a general audience book on the history and technology of human machine speech interaction. He is a fellow of IEEE and ISCA, and a member of the AVIOS board. In December 2019 he received an honorary degree of Dotctor of Science from the Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh.