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I’ve known Lyle Pratt since BetterVoice, over one decade ago. Lyle will be presenting at TADSummit in October.

Better Voice was acquired by Inteliquent (now Sinch) in May 2016. Its core retail and white label products continue to operate. They enabled small businesses to easily create a customized phone or voicemail system, BeterVoice was one of the first web-based phone systems.

BetterVoice was initially built on Twilio’s API. As BetterVoice grew they moved to FreeSWITCH, and built out the platform focused on small and medium business needs through a channel.

The thing that always impressed me with Lyle is the go to market focus. It steered the platform’s development. They focused on ensuring their service solves the problem in a way that’s easy for the customer to adopt. For example, recognizing the importance of channel for the SME to implement easily and have someone local to help.

Through Lyle’s time in Inteliquent and Sinch he realized many of the platforms he’s built. For example, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) are going to be replaced by LLMs (Large Language Models) over the next 5 years.

This led him to found Vida that provides lifelike and realistic AI voice and messaging agents for SMBs, SMEs, Developers, and Individuals via its in-house proprietary platform. Answer calls and texts with AI that always works and is never busy.

Lyle framed the current status of LLMs with hallucinations as simply it’s a new employee and training takes time. Things are rapidly improving within the core frameworks as well as performance improvements from training, guard rails, prompt engineering, integrations with industry specific platforms, etc.

For the constrained use cases SMB face, it’s good enough today. Vida uses FreeSWITCH, Drachtio, and OpenAI. Because of the GTM focus its built with partner management from the get-go to make it easy for UCaaS (e.g. NetSapiens) to adopt. Use cases include plumbers, tree services, car servicing. and healthcare. With integrations into the most used scheduling and industry specific software like Cox Auto and Athena Health.

Restating a point Karel from Voxist made a couple of years ago at TADSummit, the models are getting to the point that S2T (Speech to Text), LLM, and T2S (Text to Speech) have become a highly performant atomic unit. There is no need to have english text in the middle when voice is used, its intent and response immediately within the model.

Vida is going to be fun to monitor, they’ve hit the ground running. With a clear plan on complementing UCaaS platforms with a built for purpose AI agent. We’ll have an update from Lyle at TADSummit in October, where you can ask him questions directly.