Victor Zue

Biography

Considered a world expert on acoustic phonetics, Victor Zue’s pioneering work on developing spoken-language interfaces that make human-computer interactions easier and more natural has helped people to communicate with electronic devices much in the same way we converse with each other. The speech systems developed by Dr. Zue while head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Spoken Language Systems Group from 1989 to 2001 became the forerunners of today’s speech applications, such as the Siri application featured on Apple’s iPhones. He and his team created multilanguage conversation systems integrating speech processing with dialog-based problem solving. These interfaces provided information such as driving directions, weather information, and flight schedules through Web-browser-based systems and as speech-only systems over publicly available telephone lines.

An IEEE member and member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Dr. Zue is the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.