Helen Hastie

Very niche.

I'm not sure there was many of us.

So I got that fellowship and off I went to Georgetown.

I married Stuart in the year 2000 and we took a year-long honeymoon, which we were very fortunate to do, travelling around the world, which included going over land in a truck across Africa and then Asia and Australia.

And then we stopped off in the States having a degree in technology.

I thought I'd be quite quick to get a job.

But unfortunately, that was the time of the dot-com bubble burst.

So everything was basically shuttered up.

On the west coast of the US.

So then we moved over to the east coast.

And that's when I got a research position at AT&T Research Labs.

So IVRs, as we call them, were pretty terrible back then.

Basically, most of them would allow you to say things like say one for billing, say two for technical support.

So not a very rich interaction, not much more benefit than pressing the button on the phone.

So how may I help you was different in that it was an open question.

And so the system had to understand a whole range of different responses and then channel the customer to the appropriate department.

What I was doing was I was working with Marilyn Walker and we were looking at how we evaluate these systems.

So we called them spoken dialogue systems, and we would divide them into different parts.

So you would have the speech recognizer understanding the words, and then you need to convert those words into meaning and decide what to say next, and then what the words would be, and then turn that into a computer voice.

Nowadays, it's all one big end-to-end system, and it's trained on much data, large compute.