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Gary Clayton (b.1953) is a serial entrepreneur based in San Francisco. Most recently he was Chairman and CEO of Automatic. He oversaw the sale of Automatic to SiriusXM in April 2017. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of Automat.ai, an AI company based in Montreal and advises a number of early-stage startups.

Prior to Automatic Gary was Chief Creative Officer of Nuance Communications. In that role he ran strategy, innovation and design for the company. Prior to Nuance, Gary was VP of Speech Strategy at Yahoo!. While at Yahoo's Brickhouse innovation incubator, Gary, along with Victor Chen, created the first speech-enabled web search product, Yahoo! oneSearch with Voice. Their collaboration with Vlingo in speech recognition led to an investment in that company by Yahoo!

Prior to Yahoo!, Gary was Chief Creative Officer at Tellme Networks from 2000-2007. At Tellme, Gary was responsible for application design and development, speech engineering and creative production.

Early life
Clayton grew up in Centereach, NY. He initially started his undergrad education in physics but after reading Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions began considering the role of creativity within the Scientific Method. After moving to San Francisco to attend the NEXA program at San Francisco State University, Clayton shifted to Communications and received his B.A. Looking for an environment where he might explore creativity at the nexus of art and technology, Clayton began work as a recording engineer at Russian Hill Recording in San Francisco.

Russian Hill Recording, Clayton Multimedia Inc. and Pacific Bell
In 1981 Clayton joined Russian Hill Recording (RHR) as a junior engineer. Within a year he'd become a senior engineer with a large client list. During the 1980's, situations insured a steady stream of innovative projects arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The abundance of new technologies from companies such as Apple, Dolby, Digidesign and eventually Adobe offered powerful media creation tools. The unions in southern California, far stronger than those in the north, in many cases stunted the adoption of new technologies. RHR had a reputation for such utilizing advanced technologies. Visionaries such as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas moved north and set up their production companies. Musicians, used to working in recording studios rather than film scoring stages, sought recording studios with tools for scoring and post-production of movies. RHR was one of the first studios in the US to use SMPTE timecode-based synchronization tools to lock multi-track tape machines to video prints of dailies. Years later this became a ubiquitous method for production. Clayton found himself in demand for scoring sessions on such films as Never Cry Wolf, The Right Stuff, True Stories, Captain EO and many others. In 1987, when George Lucas opened Skywalker Ranch, Clayton found himself with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra doing the first recording sessions in the new scoring facility, Skywalker Sound.

In 1984 Apple released the Macintosh which was the first mainstream computer to utilize digital audio natively. It was in the early days of the Macintosh that Clayton worked with Ed Bogas, Steve Capps and Ty Roberts to create the first music composition software for the Mac. It was called Studio Session and during that project Clayton, having the resources of a large recording studio, was able to coax maximum fidelity from eight-bit audio samples. This led to many software projects including Worlds of Wonder's Jaminator, Jam Session for Brøderbund Software (SPA Award for Best Sound), Falcon and Tetris.

In 1985 Clayton became fully independent and formed Clayton Multimedia and continued to base his operations primarily from Russian Hill Recording.

In 1987 Clayton accompanied the Dave Brubeck Quartet on a tour of the Soviet Union. An album, Moscow Night, and the A&E television special, “Moscow Night” resulted from the tour.

Dave Brubeck and Gary Clayton on stage. Moscow, 1987.

In 1989 Clayton was nominated for a Grammy Award for Happy Anniversary, Charlie Brown in the category Best Engineered Recording (Non-classical).

In addition to film and album work, Clayton worked in advertising, multimedia and interactive media. Among his advertising work were campaigns for the initial Saturn pitch for Hal Riney, Apple, Dole, Chevron, SF Symphony Orchestra, DHL, Polaroid, Fireman's Fund, Tandem Computers, General Mills (Cheerios), Microsoft, Hersheys, San Francisco Giants, Kimberly ClarkMacDonalds, Valent, Miller Beer, Swanson's, Orville Redenbacher, St. Ives (4 Tops), Sprint, Orville Redenbacher, Sunkist and many others.

In 1992 he continued his working relationship with Ty Roberts who founded Ion Music. Over the next eight years they collaborated on projects for Brian Eno (Headcandy), David Bowie (Jump Interactive), The Residents (Gingerbread Man), Primus (Rhinoplasty) and others. Their final collaboration for Ion was an album for Reeves Gabrels, Ulysses (della Notte) in 2000. Among the tracks was Yesterday's Gone, a collaboration with The Cure. This is the last music track Clayton was to mix.

In 1996 Clayton was contracted by Pacific Bell to design a production facility for their interactive TV service. For the next three years, in addition to his media production clientele, he oversaw postproduction for in-house broadcast production. During this period he was introduced to phone systems and IVR audio production.

Tellme Networks
In early July, 2000 Clayton visited a friend at a startup in Mountain View, California called Tellme Networks. While there he became fascinated with their attempt to marry web browsing with IVR-style phone services using speech recognition. Co-founder Hadi Partovi, a mutual friend of Steve Capps, suggested he join Tellme. Initially a consumer-focused service, Tellme moved to an enterprise, cloud-based IVR company. Under the stewardship of John LaMacchia, Tellme became profitable, building phone systems for some of the largest companies in the US. During this period Clayton oversaw design, creative production and speech engineering and became Chief Creative Officer. Tellme's consumer roots lent a design ethos that was revolutionary in the staid world of enterprise customer care. This approach led to the IVR becoming a marketing vehicle in addition to it's core customer service functions. In 2005, Mike McCue regained his CEO title and moved the company back to a consumer-focus. In early 2005, Gary oversaw the creation and design of Tellme Search which went on to win the I.D. Magazine Design Review - 1st Place Interactive award. In 2007 Tellme was acquired by Microsoft for a reported $800mm and took control of operations in May, 2007.

Yahoo!
Clayton left Tellme in April 2007 and joined Yahoo!. With Victor Chen, a member of Clayton's design team at Tellme, Clayton joined the Brickhouse incubation group in their San Francisco headquarters. Shortly after joining Clayton and Chen began working on a project code-named Trill. The goal was to voice-annotate various Yahoo! web properties. This would, for example, allow a user to add a narration to a Flickr slide show or a voice greeting to an on-line greeting card. Though built, Trill was never released.

The next project Clayton undertook was product management for Ring-Ring. This was an application for the first generation iPhone. The point was to enable circuit-bridged calling for very inexpensive international calling. Though fully built, including integration to Yahoo! billing, business relationships between Yahoo! and SBC dictated Ring-Ring remain on the shelf. It was never released.

In June 2007, Clayton and Chen met Mike Phillips. Phillips, founder of SpeechWorks in 1994, had formed a new company, Mobeus, which was soon renamed Vlingo. Mike introduced Gary to a new speech-recognizer he'd built which had been trained on internet data...specifically Wikipedia and Aol corpora. For the next ten months Clayton and Chen worked with Vlingo to create unrestricted speech-enabled web search. This became ''Yahoo! oneSearch with Voice''. This was the first product to enable a user to search the web using only their voice. During the product work, Yahoo! led Vlingo's B-round financing with an undisclosed investment. In April 2008 ''Yahoo! oneSearch with Voice'' was introduced at a CTIA conference in Las Vegas to very positive reviews.

Nuance Communications
Upon invitation from Paul Ricci, CEO of Nuance Communications, Clayton joined Nuance as Chief Creative Officer in May, 2008. Joined by Victor Chen, the team began working on mobile product innovation and design. Their first major release was Dragon Dictation for iPhone. The product was well received and in February 2011 was introduced by Apple into their App Hall of Fame. Shortly thereafter Clayton and Chen designed Dragon Search. Bringing Natural Language to search yielded in their third release, Dragon Go!. Dragon Go! was very well received being awarded Time Magazine's Best Apps of the Year listing for 2011 and 2012. Clayton oversaw the development of Nina, the Nuance product suite for enabling customer care for the enterprise.

Automatic
Clayton joined the Board of Directors as the independent director of Automatic in 2014. Unforeseen difficulties required Clayton to assume the CEO role in August 2016. He oversaw the restructuring of the company and led an M&A process. In April 2017 Automatic was acquired by SiriusXM. Clayton stayed on until October 2017.

Personal Life
Clayton currently resides in San Francisco, California with his daughter, Dr. Katherine Clayton. He remains active advising a number of early stage startups.

Awards

 * 2012 Time Magazine Best Apps of the Year - Dragon Go!
 * 2011 Time Magazine Best Apps of the Year - Dragon Go!
 * 2010 Apple Application Hall of Fame - Dragon Dictation
 * 2010 Time Magazine 10 Best Apps of the Year - Dragon Dictation
 * 2007 I.D. Magazine Design Review - 1st Place Interactive, Tellme Search
 * 2007 Wall Street Journal Innovation Award - Tellme Search
 * 1989 Grammy Nomination (Best Engineered Recording)
 * 1998 Videographer Award 1st Place: Award of Excellence
 * 1998 Videographer Award 1st Place: Award of Excellence (30/60 Spot)
 * 1998 Telly Award 1st Place
 * 1998 Telly Award 1st Place
 * 1997 Communicator Award 1st Place - Award of Excellence
 * 1988 Mixer - Grammy Winner Best Jazz Vocal (Bobby McFerrin)
 * 1987 SPA Award - Best Sound