Team
Chief Executive Officer - Paul Welham
Paul has over 25 years I.T. and technology sales experience. He joined CereProc from a leading UK speech solution developer, where as Director of Sales and Marketing he helped take the company from a small start-up, with a turnover of less than GBP500,000, to a successful AIM listing in mid-2005. In this position, Paul started and developed the Sales, Marketing and Professional Services operations and was a member of the team that won many multi-million pound cinema contracts and major contracts with the NHS for speech driven systems.
Prior to this position, Paul was Sales Director at Fujitsu, where he held various senior Sales and Marketing positions, having orginally joined ICL in 1979 as a graduate recruit.
Chief Scientific Officer - Dr Matthew Aylett
Dr Aylett is a recognized world authority in speech technology research and development. Matthew was working at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley, California, before returning to Scotland in late-2005 to co-found CereProc. Prior to ICSI he was the senior development engineer at speech synthesis leader Rhetorical Systems (later acquired by Scansoft), which he joined at its formation. At Rhetorical, Matthew was responsible for the design, implementation, and testing of the company's core speech technology. Before Rhetorical, he spent five years at the University of Edinburgh researching speech and dialogue technologies.
Dr Aylett holds a BA in Computing and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, and an MSc with Distinction and PhD in Speech and Language Technology from the University Of Edinburgh.
Chief Technical Officer - Christopher Pidcock
Chris Pidcock joined CereProc as a co-founder in late 2005 to oversee the voice creation process. Chris gained extensive experience in commercial speech technology while at Rhetorical Systems and later Scansoft (now Nuance). At Rhetorical he developed multilingual speech recognition and synthesis systems as part of a consultancy team contracted to Toshiba. Later, Chris was the architect of Rhetorical's state of the art voice creation system. He is an expert in all aspects of text to speech voice creation, including voice branding, speaker analysis and selection, recording studio engineering, voice and lexicon tuning, voice building, testing and release procedures.
Chris holds an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and an MSc with Distinction in Cognitive Science and Natural Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh.
Co-Founder - Nick Wright
Nick is a co-founder of CereProc. He oversaw the Edinburgh-Stanford Link, a GBP6m fund that invested in and commercialised speech and language research at Edinburgh and Stanford universities. Nick is a recognised authority on commercialising speech technology and is a frequent industry speaker. He held a advisory position with Scoopt, a leading citizen media company, and still has a advisory position at GP Bullhound, a London and Silicon Valley - based investment bank. He also served on the advisory board of UnLtd Ventures, a GBP100m social entrepreneurship fund.