Michael McTear is an Emeritus Professor at Ulster University with a special research interest in spoken language technologies. He has been researching in the field of spoken dialogue systems for more than 20 years and is the author of the widely used textbook Spoken Dialogue Technology: Toward The Conversational User Interface (Springer Verlag, 2004). He is also co-author (with Kristiina Jokinen) of the book Spoken Dialogue Systems, Morgan and Claypool, 2010, of Voice Application Development for Android, Packt Publishing, 2013 (with Zoraida Callejas) and of The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices, co-authored with Zoraida Callejas and David Griol,published in 2016 by Springer. Currently Michael works as a consultant for Spoken Language Technology. Michael has delivered keynote addresses at many conferences and workshops and has presented on several occasions at SpeechTEK. He is a certified VoiceXML developer and has taught VoiceXML at training courses to professionals from a range of companies. He was the main developer of the VoiceXML-based home monitoring system for patients with type-2 diabetes, currently in use at the Ulster Hospital, Northern Ireland and is currently involved in several projects involving conversational agents in healthcare, mental health care, and home monitoring of the elderly.