Johan Wouters Email & Phone Number

Zurich, Ch

Burlington, Massachusetts, Us

Extend Cerence automotive voice assistant with cloud-first, voice-first, generative AI-based, end-to-end solutions, such as a smart car expert, social chat, tour guide, news. Manage a 60 person team of product managers, designers, and developers. Deliver 30 customer projects and custom sales demos per year, leading to high customer satisfaction and signed deals. Drive P&L of $50m.

Burlington, Massachusetts, Us

Increased monthly active users (MAU) of the Cerence Cloud Platform by 15% annually by adding new features and applications such as Cerence Browse, simplifying pricing and cost, improving documentation, and delivering customizations. Integrated a 3rd party Korean virtual assistant, which went live 6 months after project start. Convinced key customers to transition to new cloud architecture, unlocking key advantages to developers and users, and reducing internal costs on the legacy platform. Created marketing video about 3rd party skill imports that was shown to the Board and brought in high value skill developers.

Drove product strategy and roadmap with introduction of generative AI based voices, voice morphing, and emotional TTS. Structured and simplified portfolio of voice models across languages, footprints, platforms, and features, easing integration into the Cerence voice assistant and custom built assistants.

Grew the Nuance Text-To-Speech platform by 10+ languages and 30+ product and project voices. Managed a team of 40 engineers and linguists who recorded voices, trained linguistic models, measured and improved quality, and delivered customized solutions.

Zurich, Ch

Launched SVOX Text-To-Speech voices in Android Market and set up SVOX program for app developers. Explored rapid voice prototyping and e-learning market. The SVOX voices in Android Market generated revenue of $1,000 per day and showed 10% monthly growth when SVOX was acquired by Nuance and priorities changed.

Zurich, Ch

Architected key algorithms that determined the company's success in the market. Created software tools and processes to deliver prompt databases, leading to a professional services activity involving 100s of language specialists. Initiator and key contributor of SVOX Pico, a low-size HMM synthesis solution that was later sold to Google and integrated into the Android open source project.

Zurich, Ch

Created SVOX unit selection algorithm, which helped the company to break into the automotive market and won a first place among academic and commercial systems at the Blizzard Challenge 2007. Designed and coded SpeechCreate, a patented tool to tune unit selection results into high quality speech prompts. Created small footprint unit selection solutions that eclipsed competing TTS systems.

Product Management, Business

Phd, Computer Science And Engineering

Masters, Electrical Engineering