Voice Partners Expands European Presence with Two VUI Consultants

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Voice Partners announced the addition of two European VUI consultants to their international team: Stephen Mailey, formerly head of consulting for Fluency (UK), and Diego Montefusco, formerly of Tiscali, Italy.

Stephen Mailey was the head of Voice User Interface design and consulting at Fluency for the past four years. After graduating with a degree in Music from Trinity College Dublin in 1997, Stephen turned his focus to sound technologies and developed new AI techniques at Cambridge and Imperial College London.

For the past 4 years at Fluency his focus has been on Voice User Interface design optimization and insuring speech systems make the right impressions with their particular user group. Stephen has conducted research and empirical voice user interface analysis in the areas of dialogue design, mental modeling, the use of non-speech audio, persona and branding. At Fluency, Stephen designed numerous VUI's for travel, financial, retail, telecom and utilities companies throughout the UK, Europe and the U.S.

Diego Montefusco was a journalist in the early 1990s who promoted the Internet to the public at large on the pages of "Virtual" magazine and at conferences throughout Italy.  His articles covering human computer interaction were published all over the world including outlets in Japan, Brazil, the US, Australia and Germany, and at domestic and international conferences.

Following his work as product manager with Italian ISPs, Video Online and Telecom Italia Net, he moved to Silicon Valley to work for the Internet hardware company Teknema, which was later acquired by Ravisent Technologies.

In early 2000, he co-founded the San Francisco-based VoceViva.  After its acquisition by the pan-European ISP Tiscali, Diego created VUIs for numerous voice applications, including Tiscali by Phone. Tiscali by Phone is currently available in eight countries and six languages.