Meet Peter Szerzo

Interview of Peter Szerzo (Co-founder and Head of UI/UX) by C5 Accelerate

Andrei Papancea

05/06/2021
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As Head of UI and UX, what does a typical day in your role look like?

My role as Head of UI and UX has taken an exciting shift at NLX as I have become more of a Coordinator with particular specialization on Platform UI and UX. Throughout the day, I have the opportunity to collaborate with design freelancers and our front-end engineers as well as our dedicated Voice Compass conversational design team. I work out of Berlin, Germany, so my day starts while much of the U.S. is still asleep. This allows me to focus that time on projects I work independently on. When the afternoon hits, I begin the collaboration with my U.S. colleagues.

UI and UX stand for User Interface (UI), regarding the interface itself, and User Experience (UX), regarding how the user is using UI. When we founded NLX, there was a natural split where I took care of everything visual in the NLX products and the rest of the team covered the systems and servers. I spent most of my time designing and engineering the ways our users interact with NLX products.

I have been working out of Berlin and have not been in the United States since late 2019. As the only team member in the continent, I am available to engage with organizations as compelling new business developments arise here in Europe. We have had many new hires joining team NLX in the U.S. in recent months and I have not been able to meet them due to pandemic travel restrictions. We hope to be able to have the team meet face-to-face sometime later in 2021.

What is your background in and how did it lead you to NLX?

I went to Princeton University where I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering. I have a prolific background in physics and participated in many international competitions while I was a high school student. In 2009, I even earned a gold medal from one of these competitions. I have strong European ties and am quadrilingual- I speak Hungarian, Romanian, German, and English as well as a little Italian.

I tried out a few things before landing in the tech industry- this varied background has influenced the way I work today. I worked in natural sciences for some time and went into civil engineering and architecture after that. I also spent time working with algorithmic design, graphical work, 3d physics, and others. After I left the construction industry, I decided I wanted to transfer my skill set and start designing other things. This led me to working in data visualization at New America in DC prior to becoming a founding member of NLX.

NLX recently launched the conversational journey experience AI platform, Voice Compass. What is Voice Compass and how is it revolutionary?

Voice compass is a conversational application product that makes it easy for clients to roll out conversational experiences that are not limited to a simple voice app. It is hybrid and offers capabilities to talk to a virtual assistant, which we call a Journey Assistant, while navigating a website or mobile app at the same time. When creating Voice Compass, we addressed major pain points for customers regarding how they have been limited in what they can do for so long. We essentially give the customer the best of both worlds – giving them voice assistance to contextually help them while navigating text and visuals available on a website or mobile app. without the need to talk to a live agent. We hope to provide them further freedom in the future with as we integrate deeper into smart devices and provide bi-directional voice capabilities that leverage popular smart speakers today. What really sets Voice Compass apart is that the Journey Assistant travels with the user as they traverse any number of channels – such as website, SMS text, mobile application – in a single session and at their own pace. This puts the user back at the center of a rich customer support experience.

This post was originally published on the C5 Accelerate Blog.

Andrei Papancea

Andrei is our CEO and swiss-army knife for all things natural language-related.

He built the Natural Language Understanding platform for American Express, processing millions of conversations across AmEx’s main servicing channels.

As Director of Engineering, he deployed AWS across the business units of Argo Group, a publicly traded US company, and successfully passed the implementation through a technical audit (30+ AWS accounts managed).

He teaches graduate lectures on Cloud Computing and Big Data at Columbia University.

He holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.