iSpeech Team

Chief Executive Officer - Heath Ahrens

As founder and CEO of iSpeech, Heath implemented the first cloud-based text to speech, and has made the technology affordable and available to millions of consumers and developers. Heath envisioned the first big-data-driven, cloud-based text to speech engine years ahead of its time. Before bandwidth was inexpensive and readily available on mobile devices, when people were still using dial-up, and before cloud was called SaaS, or even ASP, Heath saw the limitations of traditional embedded text to speech synthesis and how to overcome them. The idea was revolutionary - forget embedded technology; everything would eventually be connected via Internet, so it's better to focus on reinventing text to speech with human-quality than to fumble improving old technology.

Heath's fascination with speech, language and sound began during his 3 years on stage at the Metropolitan Opera as a boy. The fundamentals of prosody, timbre and cadence interested and inspired him. Around the same time, Heath taught himself programming in Basic on his then state of the art Apple IIGS. Thus began the perfect storm. During his academic career, Heath struggled with traditional learning methods and sought out books on tape which allowed him to easily absorb information. It wasn't long before he was proofreading his papers using a makeshift text to speech, ripped out of an IVR system. His first development experience with text to speech (TTS) was in implementing IVR systems as early as 1999. It was not until 2006 that Heath would revisit TTS and begin developing iSpeech.

Since founding iSpeech, Heath has accomplished many industry firsts and notable achievements. iSpeech platform usage, both text to speech and speech recognition, is at the billions of transactions level. iSpeech is now a player in big-data with billions of data rows that are valuable for understanding language and creating statistical models of how people speak. Heath pioneered the most popular app to stop distracted driving, DriveSafe.ly®, an award winning mobile app, and the most downloaded distracted driving app (over 20 million downloads). In 2010, Heath was named to NJBIZ's "40 under 40". He has been the keynote speaker and has spoken about speech technology, bootstrapping and distracted driving at conferences including SpeechTEK , CTIA, Mobile Voice Conference, TEDx and NJTC 2011 Regional Commercialization Conference and remains active in the speech tech community.

Chief Operating Officer - Yaron Oren

Yaron has spent most of his career helping build emerging technology businesses, most recently focused on the speech technology, mobile and media industries. Before joining iSpeech, he led the ground-up development of a profitable and market leading mobile business for Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., part of Lagardare Active, the largest magazine publisher in the world. During that time, he also served as an executive mobile committee member for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Online Publishers Association (OPA). Prior to Hachette, Yaron held a variety of marketing and engineering roles at companies including Palm, Verisign and Procter & Gamble. In 2010, Yaron was named one of "15 to watch" by Min Online.

Yaron holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Chief Architect - Florencio Marin

Florencio has been with iSpeech since the beginning. Although he holds the position of Chief Architect, he is greatly involved in all technical aspects of iSpeech. Florencio led the development of iSpeech's flagship, award winning app, DriveSafe.ly®, having designed the entire infrastructure behind it. He continues to hold responsibility for iSpeech's cloud infrastructure, and with 100% uptime to date, he deserves a special title. There are junior developers, senior developers, master coders, etc. -- let's just call Florencio godly.

A former "hacker" and veteran techie, Florencio has over 15 years of software experience. His background is mainly as a software architect, programmer, database consultant and unix and windows expert. He can always look at any code and find many ways to optimize performance in no time. Developers are getting schooled by him every day -- every line of code he architects or writes is right the first time, and easily understood by his peers.

Today, Florencio is a key player in iSpeech's constantly improving services. He is responsible for designing and overseeing implementation of iSpeech's end-to-end integrated systems. He also delivers architectural initiatives that improve efficiency in-line with iSpeech's business strategy. To date, his contribution to iSpeech has been nothing short of amazing. Florencio is a true innovator at iSpeech.

Chief R&D Scientist - Qiru Zhou

Qiru is an expert on speech and language processing, signal processing of speech signals, multiple facets of human-computer interaction using speech technologies and speech software development. He has been with Bell Labs as a member of its technical staff from 1992 to 2011. As a key member of Bell Labs speech research group, he contributed and led various Bell Labs major research projects on robust, real-time speech recognition, large vocabulary speech recognition, natural language call routing, spoken language human-machine dialogue interface and architecture. He also led development of multiple commercial speech products (AT&T Watson, Lucent LASR, Lucent Speech Solutions speech server, etc.) to transfer Bell Labs speech technologies to products. His work experience includes several new venture projects, business collaboration projects within government (DARPA, European Union), AT&T, Lucent and Alcatel-Lucent core business groups.

Qiru has published journals, major conference papers and book chapters in the areas of speech and language processing, human-machine dialog and internet multimedia communications. He patented in multiple areas including speech processing, voice browsing, sensor tracking and wireless and internet multimedia communications. Qiru is a Bell Laboratories President's Gold Award Winner in 1997 for Bell Labs Automatic Speech Recognition (BLASR). He is a member of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and also represented Lucent in W3C Voice Browsing working group developing VoiceXML standard.

As Chief R&D Scientist, his role at iSpeech is to lead the development of algorithms, technologies and software to make iSpeech services the highest quality and most easily accessible to its customers and developers.

Advisor - Chadd Hunt

Chadd Hunt is a private investor and entrepreneur with over 20 years' experience in startups, including media, emerging technology platforms, B2B enterprise solutions and commodities trading.

He is currently Managing Director at Dryden & Company (a boutique investment banking consultant firm) Director at Caturra Coffee Importers and a Senior Advisor for Touchstream Technologies, LLC. parent company to Shodogg and ScreenDirect.

He holds a B.A. from Fordham University.