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D+M Wants A Say In Voice Control, Hires Robby Kilgore

D+M Group became the latest audio company announcing plans to develop a voice interface for its products.

D+M’s hiring this month of Robby Kilgore as the company’s first voice user interface (VUI) senior product manager follows last week’s announcement by Sonos that it plans to develop voice control for its wireless multiroom-audio products. Sonos said it was inspired by the success of Amazon’s Echo networked speaker and virtual digital assistant.

The Group’s brands include Denon, Heos by Denon, Marantz and Boston Acoustics. Heos offers wireless multiroom-audio products.

Kilgore “will be responsible for developing, leading and implementing the company’s voice user interface strategy across D+M’s entire product portfolio” for the company’s three major regions — the Americas, Europe and Asia/Pacific, said Brendon Stead, global product development senior VP.

Stead cited Kilgore’s “experience in consumer electronics, deep knowledge of audio and voice-technology capabilities, and ability to be globally collaborative.”

Before coming to D+M, Kilgore was chief technology officer of Catapult.org, where he was responsible for building and launching a global crowdfunding platform dedicated to gender rights. Before that, he was creative director at speech-recognition company Nuance Communications.

Kilgore was also content development senior VP for NetSage and creative director for the Social Interface Group at Microsoft.

He is also a musician, having played on hundreds of records with such artists as Steve Winwood, Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tom Waits, James Taylor, Michael Brecker, Chaka Khan and others. He is Grammy Award-winning composer and producer with several film and TV scores to his credit.

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