MLOps.community How LiveKit Became An AI Company By Accident
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Sep 16, 2025 
Russ d'Sa, CEO of LiveKit, shares his journey from an open-source project to powering voice interfaces for giants like OpenAI. The turning point came when LiveKit collaborated on ChatGPT’s voice features, showcasing the challenges of making AI sound human. He discusses the future of voice in multimodal AI, the importance of minimizing latency for real-time communication, and how entrepreneurial adaptability has shaped their innovative path. Russ believes voice holds rich signals that can transform human-AI interaction.
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Pandemic Side Project Became Infrastructure
- Russ D'Sa built LiveKit as an open-source side project during the pandemic to avoid rebuilding real-time audio/video infra.
- The project gained rapid adoption by big companies, proving product-market fit before a commercial product existed.
A Quiet Demo Led To OpenAI Collaboration
- Russ demoed a ChatGPT voice prototype by piping speech into a headless browser and got little attention initially.
- Months later OpenAI reached out and hired LiveKit to build ChatGPT voice mode, which changed their trajectory.
Voice As The Interface To Synthetic Humans
- Russ realized AI systems will be synthetic humans and voice is the natural interface to them.
- LiveKit's realtime transport can become the nervous system connecting humans to AI brains.