Irish firm, Voysis, manages to recruit one of Google's most respected engineers
An Irish company has pulled off a major coup in hiring one of Google’s most celebrated engineers, .
Ian Hodson, who was the head of Google’s text to speech program, has joined Dublin and Boston-based Voysis, a start-up that recently raised €8m from Polaris Ventures to develop its own voice recognition technology.
Mr Hodson was responsible for voice in Google Maps, Google Assistant and Android and has a sterling reputation within the IT industry.
Voysis are aiming to build on the capability of their voice recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) product to be used in eCommerce, self-driving vehicles and computing.
By hiring Mr Hodson and other industry heavyweights, Voysis founder and CEO Peter Cahill said he believed it could provide strong competition to Amazon and Google.
Mr Hodson, who for the last five years led Google’s global text-to-speech efforts, has joined the company in the role of "distinguished architect".
With more than 20 years of voice industry experience, Mr Hodson is expected to play a leading role across product, strategy and R&D.
“Ian is renowned for his domain knowledge and mentoring skills and is regarded by many leading scientists and engineers in this space as the very best at what he does. Ian's breadth of in-domain experience at companies both small and large will no doubt have an impact on all aspects of the company,” said Mr Cahill.
Mr Hodson said he was “thrilled” with the new challenge.
“Given my career to date, I have a deep appreciation and respect for the magnitude of the challenges that companies across all industries face in a voice-first world. I joined the Voysis team because of the company's impressive understanding of these challenges and its platform approach, which uniquely positions them to deliver. I am thrilled to join the team and be a part of making voice AI accessible to companies across all verticals,” he said.
Executive chairman Noel Ruane said Mr Hodson’s hire was “a great early milestone for the business” that had led to Voysis “already becoming known as a go-to destination for the top talent” coming out of leading European universities.
