The Voicebot Podcast

Zohaib Zohaib Ahmed co-founded Resemble AI in 2019 after working as a software engineer at high profile and innovative companies including Magic Leap, Hipmunk, and Blackberry. Zohaib's work at Magic Leap introduced him to novel UI interactions and his work analyzing user data led to deep learning models. From there he began to explore synthetic media and speech synthesis and Resemble was born.   Resemble AI graduated from the Betaworks Synthetic Camp accelerator back in 2019 and was recently in the news for creating Andy Warhol's voice for a new Netflix documentary.

Respeecher is one of the leading voice cloning solutions on the market today. It is also headquartered in Ukraine. In my recent update with Alex Serdiuk, I learned that despite the war in Ukraine, Respeecher was, in fact, still operating and fulfilling customer contracts.   So, we agreed to catch up on Respeecher's current business and also let everyone know the company is still operating despite the war. You are really going to like this discussion. We talk about voice cloning for media, how it's different from speech to text, deepfakes, ethical considerations, and a whole lot more.   Alex Serdiuk is CEO of Respeecher. The company has worked on several high-profile movie and TV projects including The Mandalorian where they recreated the voice of a young Luke Skywalker in an emmy-award winning piece of work.

Chris Maeda has an undergraduate degree in computer science from MIT and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. He was hacking LISP machines in the late 1980s in his first AI job and then moved onto the famed Xerox PARC.   After that, he wound up doing a lot of customer relationship management software startups including co-founding Rubric Software which merged with Broadbase in 2000 and later was absorbed into Kana where he was EVP and CTO. He also became CEO of a company that eventually acquired the marketing software solutions from Kana and added the title of CEO of MailMonitor an email marketing software company.   In 2017, Mida co-founded Botco which is focused on AI-powered natural language marketing and eCommerce automation for enterprises.

Chris Ume is a visual effects expert with many years experience in entertainment and corporate projects. In 2020, he began experimenting with deep fake technology, sourcing AI models from obscure Russian websites, and experimenting with new techniques. That led to a collaboration with an American actor known for Tom Cruise parody videos and Deep Tom Cruise was born.   Following, the viral success of those deep fake videos and others, Ume co-founded Metaphysic.ai in 2021 and the company recently closed a $7.5 million funding round.

Max Child makes his third appearance on the Voicebot Podcast to discuss the evolution of the voice games market as well as Volley's recent acquisition of Matchbox.io. Matchbox is the creator of the popular Alexa game Question of the Day and Max outlines Volley's strategy behind the purchase and how it fits into the company's portfolio. We talk extensively about voice app discovery and monetization and what is working today.  Max is a graduate of Harvard and was an analyst at Boston Consulting Group before setting out to create games. 

Kunden Kumar is head of AI at Descript. He was a co-founder of the innovative synthetic speech company Lyrebird which Descript acquired in 2019.  He has a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Montreal and a computer science degree from IIT. Kumar was also a researcher at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithems (MILA) where he was mentored by Joshua Bengio. 

Alex Quinn founded Disruptel while still in high school and the team just landed a big deal with the world's fourth-largest television maker. He says TCL was won over by the opportunity to implement the first voice assistant with eyes. Disruptel's Deep Frame product knows what is on the screen and can identify it in real time. It has an AI-vision system and an extensive facial recognition database along with a knowledge graph that gathers text-based data. A natural language voice assistant enables any number of questions about the content on screen and can be coupled with targeted advertising and voice commerce referrals. It's an interesting application that extends the boundaries of voice assistant expectations. 

Six industry leaders join with Voicebot's Bret Kinsella to discuss 2022 voice AI predictions, barriers to adoption, and top developments in the industry over the past two years. This is part two of our two-part series. Commentary from: Joao Alqueres, Iara Benjamin Brown, ConverseNow Pete Erickson, Modev Hannes Heikenheimo, Speechly Mike Zagorsek, SoundHound Dylan Zwick, Pulse Labs 

Seven industry leaders join with Voicebot's Bret Kinsella to discuss 2022 voice AI predictions, barriers to adoption, and top developments in the industry over the past two years. Commentary from: Audrey Arbeeny Chithra Durgam Jason Fields Maarten Lens-FitzGerald Todd Mozer Patricia Scanlon Amy Stapleton

Today we break down key findings from the Healthcare Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report for 2022. The data includes 2019 - 2021 trends and analysis including market size, user adoption demographics, what patients want, and much more.  This episode features Bret Kinsella breaking down the data and discussing the implications for the voice and healthcare industries. There is a companion to this episode released on YouTube where you can view the charts referenced in the show.