Dr. Monica Lam joined Stanford University's computer science department in 1988 after earning a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. She is co-author of the textbook Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools, known as the Dragon Book. More recently she has been leading the Open Virtual Assistant initiative that has at its core, the Almond open source voice assistant.  Today we talk about privacy, security, the need for choice of virtual assistants that are not controlled by 2 or 3 big companies, and the importance of reducing the cost of data annotation to make voice assistant development more accessible to a wider variety of organizations.