Deborah Dahl is a leading voice in conversational and natural-language technologies, with over 30 years of experience spanning research, defense, government and commercial systems. Currently, she is a Senior Technical Advisor with the Linux Foundation leading The Open Voice Network Interoperability Initiative. A former Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium Multimodal Interaction Working Group, current Co-Chair of the W3C Voice Interaction Community Group, and a leader of the DARPA ATIS data collection initiative, she has shaped global standards including EMMA (Extensible Multimodal Annotation) and the Multimodal Architecture & Interfaces specification. As an author of four books and numerous technical papers, Deborah brings deep expertise in speech, multimodal interaction and accessibility. Her work empowers organizations—from startups to enterprises to government agencies—to harness conversational AI with precision and impact.