Alexander Schmitt has over 15 years experience in the field of Voice Assistants, Voice AI-related research and -Product Development. Alex began his Voice AI career at University of Ulm where he joined Germany’s first spoken dialog system research lab in 2007 pursuing his PhD on AI-driven approaches for Speech Dialog Systems in cooperation with New York-based SpeechCycle Inc. In 2012 he joined Mercedes-Benz where he was working in research, advanced engineering, and product development on next generation in-car voice assistants and emotion AI. Throughout his career Alex has authored and co-authored more than 60 international publications on conferences and journals in voice assistant-related fields and is today driving next-gen #HeyMercedes Voice Assistant with an outstanding team of software developers, data scientists and product owners.