Michael McTear is an Emeritus Professor at Ulster University with a special interest in spoken language technologies. He has been researching in the field of spoken dialogue systems for more than 20 years and is the author of several books, including Spoken Dialogue Technology: Toward The Conversational User Interface (Springer, 2004), Spoken Dialogue Systems (Morgan and Claypool, 2010), with Kristiina Jokinen, and The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices (Springer, 2016), with Zoraida Callejas and David Griol. He has just completed a new book Conversational AI, to be published by Morgan & Claypool towards the end of 2020. Michael has delivered keynote addresses and tutorials at many academic conferences and workshops, and is a regular presenter at the annual SpeechTEK conference. He has also presented at the Conversational Interaction conferences in San Jose, ProjectVoice, and the REWORK AI Assistant Summits in London. Currently Michael is involved in several research and development projects investigating the use of conversational agents in socially relevant projects such as mental health monitoring, and home monitoring of the elderly.