Paul Taylor
Former Google executive Paul Taylor’s background is in text-to-speech technology. But it was a vision for the banking sector that led him to set up Thought Machine.
He saw cloud computing as the answer to problems at financial companies with out-of-date infrastructure. The company wants to rid banks of legacy systems so that they can run the best available state-of-the-art software.
Thought Machine is not Belfast-born Taylor’s first enterprise. The former student of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh also founded Phonetic Arts, a text-to-speech firm, which he sold to Google. He then ran the search giant that powered its pioneering use of text-to-speech since 2012 and it has been used on over a billion phones wordwide.
He also sold a similar enterprise, Rhetorical Systems, to Nuance, another global software company.
The self-effacing Ulsterman has referred to himself as one of the world’s worst linguists, despite having a doctorate in the subject and lecturing on it at Cambridge University. During the dotcom boom of the 1990s, he once hired the person in front of him in a queue in an off licence.
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