Meet the Twilio Champions: April Speight

Meet the Twilio Champions: April Speight

Last year we announced our Twilio Champions Program. A Twilio Champion is a developer who inspires and equips their communities using Twilio. They demonstrate leadership, expertise, advocacy, generosity, and Twilio Magic within the content they create and community building activities they participate in.

Today, we'd like to introduce to you to one of our Twilio Champions, April Speight.

April Speight is the Founder of Vogue and Code and Senior Program Manager at Microsoft. She loves talking about Python and documentation. April attended SIGNAL for the first time last year. Here's why she's coming back for 2019!

Why are communications important to you in your career or personal life?

I was essentially born with the gift of gab. So naturally, I love communicating with others. More important, I love talking to computers - which is why I love AI bots! I really like how far we’ve come with natural language processing and it’s awesome to see just how well humans can naturally communicate with bots.

Since I play with bots in my free time, I’m always looking for new bot frameworks to use. Services like Amazon Polly really gives me the opportunity to customize how Monty, my Twilio Autopilot assistant, sounds. I was shocked to see that aside from voice, you could also alter how words are pronounced!

Describe one of your favorite apps today and why.

I really like Lumosity! It helps keep my brain sharp and takes the focus off whatever else is happening in my day. Lumosity provides brain training and helps you improve areas in which you’re weak through games. It’s worth giving a try if you’re up for leveling up on how you use your brain.

Will you be at SIGNAL? How has SIGNAL been valuable for you in the past?

Yes! SIGNAL 2018 really lit a fire inside me to get serious about coding. There’s so many awesome things that people are building with Twilio products that’s it’s nearly impossible not to feel serious FOMO when your programming skills need improvement. I really wanted to build all the cool things I saw in 2018 so I spent two months improving my skills so that I could build something with Twilio. I’ve come a long way since last SIGNAL so I’m excited to see what inspires me this year.

What are you most looking forward to this year?

I’ll be on SIGNAL TV again this year! I will be participating in the pair programming sessions and will show off something cool that I made with Twilio. You’ll have to watch to see what I made!