Lawrence Piano
Director & Senior Speech Scientist

• 20+ years working in speech recognition.
• Has concentrated on developing IVR (interactive voice recognition) systems for call center automation.
• Wrote the grammars for the first large-vocabulary call center recognition system in the UK in 2000.
• Founded Abacii in 2012.
• Has delivered 50+ speech system projects for Abacii’s clients.
• Experienced in bringing projects to a successful, timely completion with a positive ROI (return on investment).
• Studied Electrical Engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy (B.Sc. 1972-1976), Computer Science at Villanova University (M.Sc. 1983-1985), and Computer Speech and Language Processing / Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (M.Phil. 1993-1994).
• Before founding Abacii, he worked as a Speech and Natural Language Consultant for SRI Consulting (1996-1999) and AtomicTangerine (1999-2001), then as a Senior Speech Scientist for Edify (2001-2005), Intervoice (2005-2009), and Convergys (2009-2012).

StJohn Piano
Transcription Project Manager

• Joined Abacii in 2015.
• Has managed 7 transcription projects, totalling 250,000+ transcriptions. The transcribed speech data is used to test the accuracy of speech recognition systems.
• Hires and trains transcribers.
• Has written software scripts to perform proofreading, spellchecking, and statistical selection for QA (quality assurance) testing on transcription projects.
• Has learned the development and tuning of IVR systems under Lawrence Piano.
• Studied Electronic Engineering at Durham University (M.Eng. 2008-2012).
• Before joining Abacii, he worked as a Research Engineer at Jali (2014-2015).