Redstart Systems, Inc.                                                                           [PDF version]
(617) 325-3966

Executive Bio

Kimberly Patch
President and Founder
Redstart Systems, Inc.

Kimberly Patch is President and Founder of Redstart Systems, a company dedicated to improving the speech interface.

Patch was a technology journalist for 20 years. She started using speech recognition software 15 years ago when she was disabled by repetitive strain injuries. She wrote custom speech interface software to enable hands-free writing, editing and production of Technology Research News, a weekly Web publication she co-founded in 1999. Redstart Systems' Utter Command software and the human-machine grammar that underpins Utter Command grew from that experience.

"I've been a journalist for many years, and I've also used speech recognition hands-free for many years," said Patch. "For a long time I was frustrated by the speech interface. The commands were sometimes long, there were multiple commands for the same function, and there was no apparent pattern to the way commands were structured -- all of which made it hard to remember the commands.

"As a writer I spend a lot of time thinking about words. And as a science and technology journalist I had to know a lot about a wide range of emerging technologies.

"Utter Command started when I, as a user, realized I could make the speech interface much less frustrating and more useful by changing the words used to control the computer and enabling combined commands.

"Utter Command was developed in a real-world environment. All the stories I wrote as a journalist between 1999 and 2005 -- and there are many of them -- were written hands-free using speech recognition. I sped myself up during those years -- first to a tolerable level, then eventually beyond the keyboard and mouse -- by improving the speech interface."

Patch has given presentations on Utter Command and Redstart Systems at SpeechTEK, SpeechTEK West, Closing the Gap, the MIT Venture Capital Conference Entrepreneur Showcase and the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) conference.

Patch has 20 years of experience as a writer and editor for magazines, newspapers and wire services, and began writing about technology in 1988. She founded the Internet beat as a Senior Editor at PC Week, was a Washington DC metro reporter for UPI, and has freelanced for many publications and news services including the AP, Reuters, the Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News, Popular Mechanics, Technology Review, Computerworld, CIO, InfoWorld, and Information Week.

Further resources:

To learn more about Kim's experience with RSI's, see Greetings from planet RSI: an attempt to explain what it's like to have hands that hurt all the time