Basic HTML Version
Voice
Coach
How one Google exec is
leveling language barriers
around the world
BY ARNIE COOPER
WHEN MIKE COHEN WAS 2,
his parents bought him a li le
white piano for Hanukkah. Forget the fact that Cohen actu-
ally recalls this, which is a feat unto itself—what’s most
intriguing is that this children’s toy embodied two concepts
that would end up guiding his life. “I remember a sense of
fascination I had with the piano,” Cohen says, “by both the
mathematics of it, in a very abstract sense, and the idea that
you could combine all these pa erns of threes and twos into
sounds. It seemed like this wondrous machine, this world
of potential.”
That same sense of potential colors his days at Google’s
Mountain View, Calif., headquarters (a.k.a. the Googleplex),
where the 50-something Brooklyn, N.Y., native has been
manager of speech technology since 2004. Cohen oversees
the internationalization project for the speech recognition
team—amouthful, nodoubt, but it boils down to some pre y
cool stuff you can now do with your mobile phone or
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
JANUARY 2012
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM
p057-058_HEM0112_Bright Ideas.indd 57
05/1