As a product owner for the Autonomous Digital Assistant, Shyamala Prayaga currently leads the company-wide Ford’s Autonomous Digital Assistant innovation for voice and chatbots by owning the roadmap and overall vision and working with cross-functional teams to bring that vision to reality.

She is a self-driven evangelist for UX and voice technology and recognizes the societal and cultural benefits of voice tech evolution. She possesses the insight and knowledge that comes with experience and leadership from her technical, development, and design roles. Her design and research work is presented nationally and internationally to general and field-specific audiences, and she has 18 years of experience designing for mobile, web, desktop, and smart TV interfaces.

Shyamala has more than six years of experience designing voice interfaces for Connected Home Experience, Automotive, and Wearables. Publications: Her work on research into usability, accessibility, speech recognition, multimodal voice user interfaces, and user interfaces for research and educational use cases has been published internationally, and her interviews have been published with several magazines and podcasts, including Forbes, the healthy code, Automotive, and TU-Auto magazines.