WiV Silicon Valley
About Women in Voice Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is the heart of innovation, and includes most headquarters of the largest tech companies. There are a lot of women in AI and Voice that have NEEDED such a community for a very, very long time.
We are very thrilled to have launched this chapter to bring this amazing community together and empower the women to thrive.
Ambassadors:
Upcoming Event
It’s time for a special happy hour – in person! ✨
Wednesday, May 24 · 6pm PDT
Location: Spark Social SF 601 Mission Bay Boulevard North San Francisco, CA 94158
Come gather and connect with your Women in Voice conversation AI network for informal networking, chatting, and libations.
Our local chapter also has recently opened up a few ambassador spots, so we’re looking for new faces to join and represent our Bay Area chapter!
This event will be held at the awesome Spark Social food truck park in Mission Bay, SF. WiV is not sponsoring this event, but there’s happy hour from 4-7pm.
PS – This event is open to Women in Voice members, friends, and our allies.
Join Women in Voice Silicon Valley!
Become an official member of Women in Voice!
The new WiV Global Membership is an upgraded experience to join our Women in Voice chapter and the global WiV community.
- Use the link below to register for a global Women in Voice membership
- When asked whether you are interested in being part of a local chapter, check our chapter's box
- We will reach out soon to welcome you!
Contact us
If you have any questions, please reach out to us via e-mail!
Social Media
We have several social media channels to share sources and to keep our community up to date. Join us here:
Get to know team WiV Silicon Valley!
Sibel Ciddi
Based in San Francisco, CA, Sibel is a conversational AI designer with a Master of Science in Computational Linguistics from Erasmus-Mundus program in Europe. Her passion for understanding human communication and natural language acquisition led her to study natural language processing which guided her into speech and voice technologies in her career. With expertise in phonology and text-to-speech, she’s the language engineer behind Google’s Turkish TTS voice. Besides her role as a language engineer, she’s worked as a text-to-speech voice producer, voice product designer, and currently works as a conversational AI designer in the fin-tech field.
Sibel values intelligent, intuitive, and empathetic user experiences as the forefront of core values in her work. Her demonstrated leadership in conversation design has allowed her to mentor and coach many junior linguists and product designers to become successful and independent conversational product team members. Follow her directly on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Leslie Pound
A 30-year Silicon Valley technologist, Leslie Pound is part of a small group of initial developers for the first virtual assistants and semantic technologies in the 2000s’. As part of SRI AI team for the largest AI effort in history, she helped develop the paradigms that are in use by todays’ assistants from Amazon to Google. Today, as CEO of TaDa Labs, she leads a team to create custom virtual assistants (with voice interfaces) that are automatically generated from datasets & databases.
Managing teams for companies from Nokia to startups, she understands how to create natural-language-based interfaces, in text or voice, that work for today, as well as, scale for tomorrow’s challenges.
She has sought to empower both non-technical individuals and businesses to get the “magic keys” to technology and believes voice technology is one key to make this happen. Partnering with the women of WIV, she believes this goal is one step closer to reality.
Angela Kelly
Angela is a Conversational UX designer focused on conversational AI workflows and solutions for text and voice applications. She first got experience in the IVR space, and more recently has been designing chatbots and voice assistants across verticals like banking, retail, airlines, insurance, and healthcare. She’s also worked on post-launch optimization and utterance analysis in order to find patterns, bias, and improve intent performance accuracy and ML metrics. In addition to conversation design, ethical AI, inclusive design, and emerging tech are topics of interest Angela likes to explore.
In her former life she was a grant writer for non-profits, focused on raising funds for general operating expenses and programming initiatives. In Angela’s free time she enjoys exploring the Bay Area’s beautiful hiking trails, paddleboarding, and crafting.
