The VoiceXML Forum’s Board of Directors is comprised of one voting representative from each Sponsor member. The Board of Directors set the strategy for the VoiceXML Forum. Learn more about the VoiceXML Forum’s leadership below:

George Erhart, Consulting Engineer, Avaya

George Erhart is a member of the Global Innovation Incubator. He is currently functioning  as a product solutions architect for bringing Google CCAI features into Avaya contact center platforms. In the past, George has also worked as technical lead for the development of the Avaya AVA product for their social media, webchat and AI chatbots and also providing the Natural Language processing components (language ID, tokenization, sentiment and entity detection) to the Avaya ADA product.

Robert Marchand, VoiceXML Forum Treasurer, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories

Rob is senior director, product management at Genesys where he is responsible for the Genesys Voice Platform, the industry’s leading standards-based IVR. Rob brings more than 23 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and currently serves as chairman of the VoiceXML Forum. Rob has contributed to the advancement of VoiceXML in the areas of standards, conformance, and education. Rob was formerly with VoiceGenie technologies, a pioneer in the VoiceXML platform space.

Paolo Baggia, Nuance

Paolo is director, international standards, at Nuance and is actively involved in the VoiceXML Forum as a director, and in the World Wide Web Consortium. Formerly, he led VoiceXML browser development for the VoxNauta platform. In 1999, he took part in a large-scale speech application: the automation of TreniItalia’s railway call centers. In 1989, he joined CSELT, Telecom Italia’s R&D lab, and was involved in several research activities, including natural language, speech parsing, spoken dialog design, and language modeling. He holds a degree in computer science from the Universita’ di Torino.