Joan Palmiter Bajorek is a speech technologist and a Conversation Experience Designer at Nuance in Seattle. She is the Founder of Women in Voice, an international empowerment organization to celebrate and amplify female and diverse talent in the field of voice technology. Bajorek is a Finalist for the Alexa Awards 2019 as "Executive of the Year." In 2018, she won the Outstanding Graduate Student Award for the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) for her dissertation research. Her dissertation explores learners of French and their experiences with speech technology and educational technology, which was a collaboration with two startups who contributed over $10k of software donations to this research.
She has published with Cambridge University Press, UXmatters, Issues & Trends in Educational Technology, the Linguist List, and the FLT Mag. As a public speaker, she has spoken at Voice Summit by Amazon Alexa, Lingofest, Dashbot.ai, Rosetta Stone, CALICO, American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), Girls Who Code, Women Who Code, R-Ladies, and the University of Arizona iSpace, among other venues. As of 2019, she is a PhD candidate the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) Program at the University of Arizona. She holds an MA in Linguistics from the University of California, Davis and undergraduate degrees from the University of Washington.
Areas of Expertise: Speech Technology, Educational Technology, Multilingualism, Professional Development