Convo AI World

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis sits down with Luka Chkhetiani from AssemblyAI to unpack what it takes to build reliable speech AI for real-world applications. Luka shares how AssemblyAI's mission evolved from making speech recognition accessible to developers into building robust models for real-time transcription, voice agents, conversational intelligence, and me...

In this episode, host Hermes Frangoudis interviews Faraz Siddiqi, co-founder and CTO of Bluejay, about testing and monitoring voice AI agents. Faraz explains how Bluejay uses "digital humans" synthetic customers with accents, background noise, and even emotions to run hundreds of parallel simulations. What used to take 10–12 hours of manual calling to test 200 menu items now takes just five minute...

In this special montage episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, host Hermes Frangoudis brings together leading researchers and founders from across the speech‑to‑text space to unpack the voice pipeline from the ground up. The conversation covers how cascading architectures stack up against real‑time speech‑to‑speech systems, why Voice Activity Detection acts as the critical traffic controller, and...

In this episode, host Rishi Ahluwalia interviews Ankur Edkie, CEO of Murf AI, about the hidden complexities of scaling enterprise voice AI. Ankur discusses the journey from pre-ChatGPT text-to-speech to building hyper-efficient, human-like voice systems. He unpacks why voice demos feel magical, but production deployments often fail, highlighting the critical gap between lab settings and the variab...

In this episode, host Derek interviews Zeyi, Founder & CEO of WaveSpeedAI, about simplifying AI media generation. Zeyi explains how WaveSpeed provides a unified, high-concurrency API that lets developers easily switch between models like Flux and Wan without managing complex GPU infrastructure. He highlights unique offerings like the 10-minute lip-sync tool InfiniteTalk and video extending, discus...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, host Hermes interviews Ricardo Herreros Symons from Speechmatics to explore the evolving landscape of speech recognition and its role as the essential gateway to "LLM magic". The conversation delves into the technical hurdles that prevent speech from being a truly "solved" problem—such as background noise, diverse accents, and specialized terminology—...

In this episode of the Convo AI podcast, host Derek Zheng has an in-person conversation in Japan with Yongle Yang, Solution Architect at Dify, to explore how their LLM Ops platform is streamlining AI application development through an intuitive workflow canvas and multi-agent orchestration. Yang details Dify’s "do it for yourself" philosophy and challenges developers to build AI that can "replace"...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, host Derek Zhang sits down for an in-person conversation in Singapore with Dr. James Ong, founder of the Artificial Intelligence International Institute (AIII). With a career spanning 40 years in the AI sector, Dr. Ong shares his vision of "AI for Humanity"—from advocating for UN SDG Goal 18 to building practical governance frameworks. The discussion...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis interviews Klemen Simonic, founder and CEO of Soniox, who discusses how his team is achieving native speaker accuracy across 60+ languages. Klemen explains how Soniox leverages unsupervised learning and a universal model architecture to handle seamless language switching and real-time, mid-sentence translation with minimal latency. B...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis interviews Emilia Molimpakis, CEO and Co-founder of thymia, who discusses how biomarker-enriched voice intelligence is becoming critical safety infrastructure for communications platforms. Emilia explains how thymia goes beyond words to understand human state in real time—analyzing not just what people say, but how they say it. By co...

In this conversation, Derek Zheng and Jia Shen discuss the evolving landscape of the virtual economy, focusing on AI-driven virtual characters and their applications in gaming and entertainment. They share insights from the Tokyo Game Show, the challenges of showcasing AI technology at events, and the unique approach of AKA Virtual in creating animated characters. The discussion also touches on th...

In this episode of the ConvoAI World Podcast, host Hermes Frangoudis interviews Diana Zhu, Head of the US Office at RiseLink, regarding their development of ultra-low-power edge AI chips designed to make hardware more intelligent and accessible. Diana highlights the BK7259 chip, which utilizes a multi-core architecture and an on-board NPU to enable complex tasks like facial recognition and voice p...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Rishi Ahluwalia interviews Punit Pandey, Co-founder and CIO of Astrosage, who discusses the intersection of astrology and AI. Punit shares his journey, including pivotal moments that led him to realize the potential of conversational AI in transforming astrology. He explains the technology behind the AI astrologer, the importance of emotional intellig...

In this special episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Patrick Ferriter interviews Joe Zhaozhi Sun, CEO and co-founder of RoboPoet, at the Fuzozo store in Shanghai to discuss the origins and technology behind the Fuzozo AI companions. They explore the product's design philosophy, which draws on Joe's background in automotive and robot design to prioritize emotional connection and "healing" lonelin...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Derek Zheng interviews Bruce Yang, Founder and CEO of Agnes AI, discussing the platform's meteoric rise to a $100 million valuation and its acquisition of 3 million users in Southeast Asia. They explore Agnes AI's positioning as a mobile-first, "sovereign AI" that blends productivity with social networking, distinguishing itself from competitors like...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Rishi Ahluwalia interviews Supreet Singh, Senior Director of Engineering at Physics Wallah, discussing the transformative role of EdTech and conversational AI in education. Supreet shares his journey from a small city in India to leading engineering efforts in one of the largest EdTech companies. The conversation explores the evolution of conversation...

In this episode of the Convoy AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis interviews Lily Clifford, CEO of Rime AI, discussing the evolution of voice AI technology. They explore the importance of high-quality data, the impact of linguistic nuances on voice models, and the challenges of creating relatable and multilingual voice agents. Lily shares insights on customer experience, the role of R&D in meeting...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis interviews Ram Katamaraja, the founder of Colaberry. They discuss the origin of Colaberry, its mission to help individuals transition into tech jobs, and the impact of AI on workforce development. Ram shares insights on the importance of upskilling, the role of conversational AI in enhancing user experience, and the future of work as...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Rishi Ahluwalia speaks with Sagar Gaonkar, Chief Technology Officer at Eloelo, about the transformative role of conversational AI in the live entertainment industry. They discuss Sagar's extensive experience in video streaming, the challenges of integrating AI in a diverse linguistic landscape like India, and the innovative use cases that conversation...

In this episode of the Convo AI World podcast, Hermes Frangoudis interviews Jeff Lu from Akool, a company revolutionizing video generation technology. They discuss Akool's origin, its innovative approach to visual storytelling, and the various use cases of its technology in marketing, internal communications, and more. Jeff shares insights on the challenges of balancing quality and cost in video g...

In this episode of Convo AI World Podcast, we dive deep into the future of AI, telecom, and the evolving role of conversational interfaces with Prof. Merouane Debbah, Founding Director of the Khalifa University 6G Research Center and one of the leading minds behind the Arab world’s first large language models — Noor and Falcon. Check out video episodes and subscribe to the Convo AI Newsletter at p...

In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis interviews Amogha Srirangarajan, Co-founder and CEO of Carbon Origins. They discuss the evolution of Carbon Origins from last-mile delivery robots to heavy machinery teleoperation, the integration of voice AI and VR in enhancing operator experiences, and the future of robotics in construction and space mining. Amogha shares insights...

Ziyi Lin, speech engineer on the TEN Framework team, joins the Convo AI World podcast to explore the design and impact of a new open-source Voice Activity Detection (VAD) model. The episode explores the challenges faced with existing VAD solutions, the importance of high-quality training data, and the design choices that led to improved performance metrics. Ziyi explains how VAD functions as a cri...

Thibault Mardinli (T-Bot) from Voice AI Space joins to discuss the evolution of Voice AI communities and ecosystems. Hermes and Thibault explore Thibault's journey from building a Voice AI startup to creating an open resource platform, the challenges of discoverability in the fragmented Voice AI landscape, and the democratization of AI expertise through visual interfaces. The conversation covers t...

Deepgram's VP of Research Andrew Seagraves joins to explore the science and engineering behind modern speech recognition systems. Hermes and Andrew dive deep into why speech recognition isn't a solved problem, the two-stage training process of speech-to-text models, and the challenges of balancing real-time latency with accuracy. The conversation covers Deepgram's origins from dark matter research...