BONUS TALK | Speech: The Other, Other NLP by Heather Nolis. Visit https://rstats.ai/nyr/ to learn more. Abstract: After spending two years entrenched in building models on customer care text message conversations between our experts and our customers, our stakeholders had a "simple" request - "Do this, but for phone calls... Also, at 10 times the volume." In this talk, I will walk through a few of the experiments we performed in an attempt to get our beautiful text-trained R-Keras models, presented at last year's R Conference | NY, to work on real-time voice conversations at scale. This includes an overview of telephony audio data, the state of speech-to-text technology, and the things you didn't know you need to know if you're diving into speech for the first time. Bio: Heather began her academic career receiving a dual degree in French and Neuroscience with intent to pursue a PhD in molecular neuropharmacology. Once she realized how heavily that field relied on software built by other people, she pivoted - deciding to make software herself. Over her time in graduate school for Computer Science at Seattle University and working as a software engineer at T-Mobile, she's developed significant strength in machine learning, cloud computing, and proof-of-concept product development. Twitter: https://twitter.com/heatherklus Presented as a Bonus Talk for the August 2020 R Conference | New York