About me

Wow, thank you for being so interested in me that you followed a link to this site! I’d really love to learn more about you, too! Maybe we can get in touch by email or Twitter?

Anyway, let’s talk about me for a minute. Why do I develop voice games, and what qualifies me for it? Well, to use an established analogy: My life is like a drainage basin, and there are tributaries from its different parts that all feed into the main stem river. In my case, those tributaries to the voice game development river are:

• Programming in general. I’ve been programming since 2004, either for fun, studies, my PhD work, personal utility stuff, and most recently freelance work.
  Developing voice games is a field where you can get great results without being a certified full stack developer.
• Chatbots. I have a deep fascination and respect for conversational chatbots and am interested in the Loebner contest since 2009. Steve Worswick, Bruce Wilcox and Joseph Weizenbaum are heroes of mine! I developed a coaching chatbot in summer 2017, right before I decided to focus on Alexa Skill games instead.
  Like chatbots, voice games are a lot about simulating a natural conversation and anticipating / directing its course.
• Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning. I have a strong bio-informatics background, and worked quite a bit with graph kernels and supervised feature extraction of microscopic images.
  While not immediately related, voice technology and artificial intelligence catalyze each other and mature together.
• Language. I love the richness of natural language, and the diversity and evolution of vocabulary and grammar! I’ve never done anything professional with language, but I read a lot, did some natural language processing, and learned a few foreign languages.
  Knowing about language helps you design more natural voice user interfaces.
• Psychology. I’m fascinated by how the brain works, and especially how irrational behavior can be leveraged — This is basically how and why I worked in sales and marketing since 2012.
  The key to making great games is in the balance of arousing and catering to basic human impulses.
• Empathy. I experienced time and again, from traveling, over raising two wonderful children with my brilliant wife, to various customer service jobs I had or simply talking with people, that the richest experiences originate from bridging the gaps between human beings and seeing the world through their eyes.
  Empathy is the magic ingredient in creating value for your stakeholders, your users, and ultimately yourself.

I think there’s no point in giving you my full CV here — If you’re interested in any of my previous endeavors, feel free to ask. Instead, I’m giving you an assortment of random facts about me (Hm, sounds like an idea for a really boring voice game!):

• My favorite artists are the Cardigans, and Charlotte Gainsbourg
• Some of my favorite non-fiction books are ‘Guns, germs and steel’ (Jared Diamond), ‘The power of babel’ (John McWhorter), ‘Influence’ (Robert Cialdini) and ‘To have or to be?’ (Erich Fromm)
• My favorite author is Neal Stephenson, but my favorite book is ‘S (Ship of Theseus)’ (Jeffrey Abrams/Doug Dorst)
• My favorite landscape is not mountains or beach, but hilly forest (at rain)
• My favorite programming language is Python
• ‘Sunscreen’ by Baz Luhrman is my life’s paradigm

I’m humbled that you actually made it all the way down here — Thanks again for your interest! If there’s anything about my background that you’re still interested about or that’s worth including on this site, please let me know! :)