Founders of Simple AI, Catheryn Li & Zach Kamran, discuss their journey from building consumer apps to creating an AI sales agent that handles inbound calls for major brands. They cover their pivot, the technical challenges of integrating with legacy systems, and how their AI outperforms human reps by leveraging hyper-personalization and rapid A/B testing.
Mati and Piotr, the founders of ElevenLabs, discuss their journey from a weekend project to a major player in voice AI. They cover their unique remote-first culture, their philosophy of combining product and research, and their vision for voice as the next fundamental human-computer interface, aiming to create AI that can pass a 'vocal Turing test'.
Panos Stravopodis, CTO of Elyos AI, shares the infrastructure and orchestration challenges of building production-ready voice AI agents. He details the four pillars for success—latency, consistency, context, and recovery—and provides engineering patterns for error handling, context management, and achieving conversational coherence in real-time systems.
Karan Goel, CEO of Cartesia, discusses the fundamental limitations of Transformer architectures, arguing they behave more like retrieval systems than learning systems. He explains how State Space Models (SSMs) enable compression and abstraction, and why Cartesia is tackling multimodal intelligence by first solving for voice AI, aiming to develop a transferable 'recipe' for end-to-end representation learning.
Anoop Dawar from Deepgram discusses the evolution of voice AI, from basic transcription to sophisticated, real-time voice agents. He covers the key technical challenges in production, such as latency and interruption handling, and introduces Deepgram's Flux system. The talk concludes with a look at the future of speech-to-speech models that can understand emotional nuance, moving closer to passing the audio Turing Test.
Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, discusses the company's strategy for rapidly shipping research-grade AI. He covers their organizational structure of small, autonomous teams, a global and remote-first hiring philosophy, the transition from a creator-focused product to an enterprise platform, and the lessons learned in navigating complex licensing and scaling a go-to-market team.