In a live panel at the Physical AI Builders Forum, founders and operators in computer vision, robotics, and multimodal AI share their 2026 playbooks. The discussion covers the architectural differences between physical and generative AI, the strategic shift from frame AI to scene AI for enterprise value, and the critical skills needed to build and scale a modern AI business.
Dr. Samuele Cornell from Carnegie Mellon University discusses the persistent challenges in distant automatic speech recognition (DASR) for spontaneous, multi-party conversations. He explains why state-of-the-art systems falter in real-world scenarios and presents recent advancements through three key efforts: (1) insights from the CHiME-7/8 DASR challenges, which benchmark robust meeting transcription; (2) progress towards unified end-to-end models that jointly handle diarization and recognition; and (3) novel techniques for generating realistic, large-scale training data using a combination of large language models and multi-speaker text-to-speech systems.
Russ d'Sa, CEO of LiveKit, recounts the company's unexpected journey from a pandemic-era open-source WebRTC project to becoming a crucial infrastructure provider for AI voice interfaces, most notably for OpenAI's ChatGPT. He details the serendipitous moments that led to this pivot and shares his vision for LiveKit as the nervous system for a multimodal AI future.
Dara Ladjevardian, founder of Delphi, discusses creating "digital minds" using an adaptive temporal knowledge graph. Inspired by Ray Kurzweil's theory of the mind, this technology aims to scale human thought and expertise, transforming content consumption from static feeds into interactive, conversational media while emphasizing the premium value of authentic human connection.
An in-depth look at building real-time, production-grade voice AI agents using the open-source Pipecat framework. This summary covers the core concepts of voice AI pipelines, the shift to speech-to-speech models like Gemini Live, and advanced techniques for managing latency, context, and turn-taking.
Brooke Hopkins, founder of Coval, discusses how evaluation methodologies from the autonomous vehicle industry, particularly from her experience at Waymo, can be adapted to build reliable, scalable, and trustworthy voice and conversational AI systems.