Language Intelligence,
Applied.
AI Language Strategy
Where your language meets your model and your market. I help teams decide where AI should carry linguistic load — and where human judgment must stay — then design the system around it.
- Conversational & prompt architecture
- Voice, tone & terminology systems
- Risk & alignment review
AI Business Formation Assistance
For founders building at the edge of language and AI. Strategic guidance from concept to company — positioning, naming, narrative, and the operational scaffolding of an AI-native venture.
- Positioning & category design
- Naming & brand language
- Go-to-market narrative
Custom Language Models & Evaluation
Models you can trust, measured the way a linguist would. I design, adapt, and rigorously evaluate language models against benchmarks grounded in real linguistic structure.
- Fine-tuning & adaptation
- Evaluation harness design
- Linguistic QA & red-teaming
Support agent that sounds human
Rebuilding a fintech’s AI support voice around real conversational structure — fewer escalations, measurably warmer tone.
Benchmarks a linguist would trust
A linguistically-grounded evaluation harness that caught failure modes generic benchmarks missed.
Naming an AI-native category
Positioning and naming for a founder defining a new category at the language–AI seam.
Custom AI Language Assessment
A focused diagnostic of how language flows through your product, model, or organization — where meaning breaks, where AI can carry load, and the highest-leverage next moves. Delivered as a written report.
- Audit of your language-facing surfaces — copy, prompts, model outputs, taxonomy.
- Linguistically-grounded scoring of clarity, consistency, and alignment risk.
- A prioritized roadmap with concrete, buildable recommendations.
For more than twenty years I've asked one question: how do people actually understand spoken language? Today I bring that science to companies and founders building with AI.
I studied Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, then earned my doctorate — a Linguistics, Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology PhD — through the joint Harvard and MIT program, and won an NSF CAREER Award along the way. I earned tenure as a professor at Michigan State University and led a speech perception & production lab — two decades of peer-reviewed research and more than 6,000 scholarly citations on how humans process speech: perception, prosody, timing, and the development of language itself. I’m a tenured professor turned founder now, carrying that work from the lab into AI.
My work has shown something that still surprises people: the speech rate of the surrounding context can make you hear a word that was never acoustically there — or miss one that was (published in Psychological Science, 2010). So much of language is reconstruction, not recording. It's exactly the gap between signal and meaning that large language models now have to navigate, too.
I work at that seam — as a consultant and entrepreneur — bringing scientific rigor to a field that often runs on intuition, and keeping the work plain-spoken, honest, and useful. If you're building something where language and AI meet and the stakes are real, that's exactly the kind of problem I take on.
A focused conversation, no pitch.
Twenty-five minutes to understand your problem and tell you, honestly, whether and how I can help.
Tell me
what you're
building.
I reply to every serious inquiry personally — usually within two business days.