Voice is in our DNA

Our goal is to make healthcare affordable, accurate, and accessible for everyone, everywhere.

Meet our Founders

The Canary Speech team are industry leaders in voice AI, backed by decades of experience and research in speech recognition and machine learning technology. Our team brings expertise from Amazon Alexa’s founding speech lab and neurology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Henry O'Connell

Co-Founder & CEO

Henry has spent more than thirty years leading healthcare technology companies. Following his neurology work at the National Institutes of Health, and C-Suite positions at Hewlett-Packard and Gilson, Henry served as president and CEO of MOXTEK, a leading supplier of nano-optical and x-ray components used in display electronics, imaging, and analytical instrumentation.

As the author or co-author of twelve patents and a frequent speaker at technology and healthcare conferences, Henry brings exceptional experience leading companies to success.

Jeff Adams

Co-Founder & Chief Speech Officer

Jeff is one of speech AI’s most prominent figures, with more than twenty years of experience in speech and language technology. He was recruited to lead Amazon’s founding voice AI team on the strength of his groundbreaking work on speech recognition at Nuance, and voice-to-text transcription at Yap.

Jeff was instrumental in developing the speech recognition technology powering household-name Amazon products like Alexa, Echo, Dash, and Fire TV. After departing Amazon, he went on to found Cobalt Speech & Language, an automatic speech recognition technology, and Canary Speech.

Our world-class team of experts in speech and language technology

Nate Blaylock

Chief Technology Officer

Nate leads Canary's research and engineering teams. With more than 15 years in speech, NLP, and AI, and more than 30 publications, Nate is a respected industry leader in speech and language technology. Before joining Canary, Nate was senior architect at Nuance Communications, and led NLU and voice AI modeling at Cerence.

Patty Kuppenbender

Chief Revenue Officer

Patty has served in the healthcare industry for almost 40 years and brings expertise in the commercialization and growth acceleration of innovative products and services. She has held leadership roles at Biocraft Laboratories, Terumo Medical, Whitmire Distribution (Cardinal Health), McKesson Corporation, TechRx/NDCHealth, Open Connect Systems, Assembia Health, and recently at AI voice technology company Constant Companion.

Jeremy McFadden

CFO & Chief Data Officer

Jeremy brings more than 20 years of expertise in healthcare technology and 3 CFO roles to Canary Speech. As CFO of Acessa Health, Inc, Jeremy scaled the company to successful acquirement. His professional career has spanned finance, technology, and healthcare roles at Philips Healthcare and Deloitte.

David Brown

VP, Engineering

David heads Canary's software team, backed by 25 years of experience in leadership roles. David led Verizon's digital media services as Senior Director of Engineering, scaling streaming powerhouses like Disney, ABC, ESPN, and Hulu. His work powered top-streaming Verizon events such as the Super Bowl, World Cup, and the NBA Finals.

Namhee Kwon

VP, Research

Namhee leads Canary Speech's research team, building AI and speech analysis modeling with over 20 years of experience in AI, NLP, and speech analysis. Her past work includes data mining/NLP processing at AI-based Reunify, software engineering at Samsung, and search/recommendation at Myspace.

Caitlyn Brooksby

VP, Marketing

Caitlyn leads Canary's marketing and communication teams with more than a decade of experience in the healthcare, technology, and start-up sectors. Before joining Canary Speech, her previous experience included Fortune 500 roles, including but not limited to 3M Health Information Systems, and Intermountain Healthcare.

Doug Crockett

VP, Operations

Doug is a highly successful professional known for bridging the gap between business and IT. Doug brings proven expertise in assessing, planning, and delivering scalable capabilities to Canary's product team. His past work includes UnitedHealthcare, Accenture, and the US Army. His commitment to excellence and passion for innovation make him an invaluable asset to the organization.