Cathy Pearl is VP of User Experience for Sensely, where she helps to bring the virtual nurse avatar to life, making her conversational and empathetic when talking to patients with chronic health conditions. Cathy is the author of Designing Voice User Interfaces.
Cathy has been interested in talking to computers since she was a child and wrote her first conversational program on the Commodore 64. She studied Cognitive Science and Computer Science and learned about psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. She has been designing voice user interfaces since 1999, when she started at Nuance Communications. She has worked on everything from helicopter pilot simulators at NASA to a conversational iPad app that has Esquire Magazine's style columnist tells the user what they should wear on a first date. During her time at Nuance and Microsoft, she designed voice user interfaces for banks, airlines, healthcare companies, and Ford SYNC.