My Journey from Research to Product

After 11 years working in Microsoft Research studying technology use in homes and building technologies for families, in January 2016 I took a leap and joined the Microsoft Cortana product team with the goal of shipping the technologies I had been researching. For Cortana, I’ve helped drive far-field speech interaction experiences, ship Microsoft’s Cortana Invoke speaker and led Microsoft’s multi-assistant strategy including connecting Cortana and Alexa. I’ll share the lessons I have learned in my journey from doing research to being part of a team shipping features used by millions of people including some surprising similarities between working in research and product development as well as unanticipated differences. With the rapid adoption of digital assistants from a range of companies on many different hardware form factors this is an exciting time to be working on speech interaction and digital assistance.