Yves Normandin, Chief Executive Officer

Yves is a leading authority in speech recognition technology and spoken dialog systems, with over 20 years of experience in the field spanning research, product and application development, as well as market and business development. Before founding Nu Echo in 2002, he had been the founder and CTO of LocusDialog, a Montreal-based speech recognition company — now part of Nuance communications — with technology and products installed in over 1,000 customer sites in America and Europe.

Prior to founding LocusDialog, he had spent ten years leading the speech recognition research group at CRIM (Computer Research Institute of Montreal), building it from the ground up into one of the most highly respected groups internationally in the field.

Known as a technology innovator, he holds a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in speech recognition from McGill University. His research work is still widely referenced in technical publications and some of the techniques he pioneered are now used in the most advanced speech recognition systems.

Gilles Hurteau, Executive Vice-President

Gilles Hurteau is a talented executive with over 15 years of working experience in information technology. He has been a key technical leader in various high-risk leading edge projects at CAE Electronics Ltd, DMR Group, CRIM (Computer Research Institute of Montreal), Locus Dialogue (which he co-founded in 1996) and InfoSpace Speech Solutions. Over the last 10 years, he developed result oriented management skills, which led to the delivery of high quality software even under severe time and budget constraints.

His work experience and technical expertise cover many areas such as system monitoring and management, fault tolerance, computer and software architecture, computer networks, parallel computing, computer languages and their compilation, simulation, speech recognition, and telephony. He led the development of various speech products including a speech development toolkit, a speech enabled auto-attendant and a VoiceXML platform.