Yap® - Inventing Freedom of Speech

Management

To achieve the highest levels of performance for our customers and partners, we assembled a world class team in the realms of audio semiconductors and speech recognition. Our R&D staff helped create leading products such as Apple's iPod, Honda's navigation, IBM's ViaVoice and Nuance's Dragon.

Igor Jablokov - CEO

Igor has served as Yap's CEO since its inception. He is a pioneer in speech technology, especially focused on human-computer user interfaces on mobile devices.

Prior to co-founding Yap, Igor served as Program Director of IBM's multimodal and voice portal groups. During his tenure there, he led his team to create the world's first ever speech-enabled web browser. Additionally, he served as a business mentor for IBM's elite Extreme Blue internship program and represented the Company as chairman of the board for the VoiceXML Forum, an industry group driving an open standards-based vision of speech computing. Previously, he held positions with IBM's Pervasive Computing, PartnerWorld, Global Industries and Microelectronics divisions.

Igor has over a dozen patents pending in this field, was named an industry luminary by the editors of Speech Technology Magazine and was a Gaelen Entrepreneurship Speaker for Penn State's College of Engineering. He is a member of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society and holds an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from the University of North Carolina.

Victor Jablokov - COO

Victor is a Yap co-founder and has served as its COO since inception. He was pivotal in growing the Company from its original vision of solving the texting while driving problem and into the cloud-based speech recognition platform it is today.  Victor oversees all business development, finance, legal, marketing, product management and sales functions wthin the organization.

Prior to Yap, Victor executed advanced R&D and product development at ATI and Siemens for a myriad of customers in the aviation, defense, medical and power generation industries.  He performed fundamental research at the Los Alamos National Lab, authored a number of peer-reviewed technical articles and has filed more than 10 patent disclosures. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Materials Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from Wake Forest University.

Felix Gofman - VP of Worldwide Sales & Business Development

Felix joined us to lead all sales and business development efforts. He brings over 17 years of high-tech industry experience in marketing and selling innovative software applications.

Felix came to Yap after a distinguished 10 year career at Nuance, the industry pioneer in speech recognition technology. Most recently, Felix was responsible for building Nuance's mobile ecosystem and unified messaging partnerships. Felix was also a founding member of the Nuance product management organization. Additionally, he led the team responsible for the flagship core speech recognition, speaker verification and text-to-speech engines. These innovations were instrumental in positioning the company from start-up, through successful IPO in 2001, to a premier speech technology provider with a $2B+ market cap.

Before joining Nuance, Felix held various technical pre- and post- sales roles in Silicon Valley technology companies. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Kiev State University and an MBA in Marketing from Golden Gate University.

Jeff Adams - VP of Research & Development

Jeff joined us to establish a world-class speech research group and to oversee the development of our highly accurate speech recognition technologies. He brings 14 years of speech research management experience to Yap.

Under Jeff’s leadership, speech scientists at Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Lernout and Hauspie, Dragon, ScanSoft, and Nuance achieved unprecedented breakthroughs in accuracy with leading-edge commercial large-vocabulary speech recognition products such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking, L&H VoiceXpress, Kurzweil Voice, and Dictaphone EXSpeech & PowerScribe. Jeff continues that tradition at Yap, where he presides over the dawn of a new age of novel, server-based recognition systems that rival, and often exceed, human accuracy levels.

Jeff studied mathematics at Brigham Young University (B.S., summa cum laude, 1984), the University of California (M.A., 1989), and the University of Oregon. He worked as a mathematician for the Department of Defense for several years before applying his skills to speech recognition.

Marcello Typrin - VP of Marketing & Product Management

Marcello brings over 15 years experience in developing product strategies, shipping breakthrough services and marketing consumer-facing solutions distributed via carrier and enterprise channels.

Prior to joining Yap, Marcello was Director of Product Management and Planning at Tellme Networks (acquired by Microsoft).  In this role, Marcello shipped the company’s flagship voice-enabled mobile experiences via tier 1 carriers and device OEMs, introduced Tellme’s voice-driven information and navigation services into SYNC-equipped Ford vehicles and managed Tellme’s Voice Information Services and Voice Activated Dialing product lines.  Prior to Tellme and Microsoft, Marcello ran the Product Marketing organization at Nuance.

Marcello holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business and undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees from Virginia Tech.

Rick Terrell - VP of Engineering & Operations

Rick joined us as one of the industry's foremost authorities in mobile power management. With an impressive background of over 20 years of engineering and management, focusing on consumer electronics silicon and software design, Rick brings a wealth of knowledge to the Yap team. Although he enjoys technology for its own sake, his real passion is turning it into mass-market products that delight everyone's eyes and ears.

Prior to joining the team, Rick was a Principal Engineer at NVIDIA and a Senior Member of Technical Staff at PortalPlayer. At PortalPlayer he helped create the system-on-chip and firmware engines that power successful products such as the Apple iPod. Previous to that, he worked on groundbreaking handheld computers at Norand/Intermec, and award winning laptops at Zenith Data Systems.

Rick holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Andrews University and has numerous patents, both issued and pending, relating to chip design, mobile computing, motorsports, software and web services.