The pipeline for voice—Kwindla Hultman Kramer, CEO of Daily

Much of my childhood was spent in my basement, dialing up other people’s computers to trade messages and play games.

Kwin Kramer from Daily remembers that time, too—and says today's voice AI moment feels just like those early internet days. That sense of endless possibilities is back.

His open-source project PipeCat has become the standard toolkit for voice agents. What began as an experiment now powers voice AI for OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and countless startups, making conversations feel natural and responsive.

Some highlights:

* That early internet feeling is back: "1995 to 1999 felt a certain way. It never felt that way again until 2023 to 2025."

* GPT-4 transformed Daily's business by removing a key bottleneck: "Previously you needed two humans for a conversation. Now you only need one, maybe not even that."

* Voice AI's killer feature? Latency matters: "If response times are long, you're in that uncanny valley where people get uncomfortable."

* Kwin's bold prediction: "We're all going to have friends in our group chats that aren't human because LLMs are actually really entertaining."

Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Links

Daily: https://daily.co/PipeCat: https://pipecat.ai/Kwin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kwindla

Chapters

0:00 Intro

2:02 First AI aha moment

5:43 MIT Media Lab beginnings

9:05 BBS and door games

15:26 The AllAfrica journey

18:54 Starting Daily

21:13 COVID's impact on WebRTC

22:36 GPT-4 transformation

31:26 Building voice for LLMs

35:17 PipeCat's key challenges

44:10 The future of speech-to-speech

47:10 Voice AI adoption trends

52:34 Vibe coding revolution

56:11 What's next for PipeCat

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.smartspeakers.fm