Background
Thibault [T-Bot] Mardinli is mapping the Voice AI space and helping people navigate its rapidly developing territories. He brings a unique set of experiences, especially in events, and most importantly learning from trying and failing. Such learning creates entrepreneurs that can change industries.
He created a start-up a couple of years ago with a voice ai product, smart walkie talkie for large event operations. It was too early to market given the audio delays. But with audio-to-audio technology today the time is now right.
He decided to share his discoveries and learning to help at least one person navigate the ecosystem and support themselves. T-bot has built an impressive listing of products, news, tutorials, jobs and events.
He positions himself as a “journalist” promoting this technology as he is convinced (as many) of his transformative power. T-bot is super interested in the unusual crazy cool or for the good use cases.
He is building out the website Voice AI Space and looking to partner with brands by putting a spotlight on the cool, the good in order to fight the bad and ugly! A mission we at TADSummit support.
Rob Pickering is a supporter of T-Bot, and only recently we realized our mutual admiration of what he is building.
How Voice AI Space Began
The focus of this session is T-bot and the website Voice AI Space. As you see in the video T-bot is humble. Starting a business is not easy, and only a few people do that. However, it brings much learning. T-bot built on his events experience, creating an app that supports a smart walkie talkie for large event operations. With live translation, human to machine, machine to human, note taking, summarization, etc,
Before and during an event, it’s an intense experience, and many things fall through the cracks of an organization. T-bot’s experience showed there was a clear problem to be solved.
The learning from his start-up made T-bot resolved to help people not repeat his mistakes. There is much BS in the AI market at the moment, for example phrases like “AI-led business transformation”. T-bot’s mission is one Rob and I support, sharing the latest insights and experience with no BS, to help everyone in the industry, both buyers and seller make the right decisions for them.
T-bot loves reading and collecting information. He’d built a large library of information around voice AI during and after his start-up, and this became the genesis of Voice AI Space. From which he has built a large repository of Voice AI knowledge, news, jobs, lab, library, etc. Which has grown into 10k visitors per month.
T-bot frankly reviewed the market testing of his events app and how slick the solution would need to be for the events market. Generally, events people are not technologists, so their tolerance to teething issues is low. So T-bot was resolved that the technology and MVP (Minimal Viable Product) were not yet aligned in the near term.
I think T-bot was in the right direction, vertical focus is critical to solve a pain point large enough for customer action and easy enough for AI to reliably deliver.
The challenge faced by T-bot towards the end of his start-up was the explosion of technologies in voice AI made building the product challenging. There was always something new to test out. That is very true today. Every product / solution has a different balance. Vida from Lyle shows a balance tuned for SMB that works today. Simply catching leads from the torrents of spam plaguing the PSTN.
State of the Art
We moved on from T-bot’s experience into his broader view of the market. He highlighted the BS, over-promising and under-delivering. Hence the important role Voice AI Space plays in helping people cut through the BS.
Vishr.ai is a gem for T-bot a small team marking a difference, and doing it with style.
Ash, AI Therapy. This reminded me of several of the Voice AI hacks created at Telnyx TADHack, such as Calmmi by Sabrina based in Orlando USA, and Lightmood, by Alanis Rondon also based in Orlando. I strongly recommend you review all the VoiceAI hacks to see the power of voice AI in the hands of developers from around the world.
For T-bot, apps focused on education, health, and support matter. Which were dominant themes at Telnyx TADHack.
Where is Voice AI Space going?
In the beginning it was about helping one person succeed in Voice AI. Which he has most definitely achieved. T-bot wants to enable voice AI applications to be hosted on the site, so developers can use the apps, and access the open source code to build with it themselves.
Education and tutorials are areas T-bot thinks voice AI can dramatically accelerate.
For Rob, the market has reached an interesting phase. Over the past 2 years the horizontal platforms and their capabilities has exploded, there are tools everywhere. It’s a gold rush and there are spade shops popping up daily. BUT there’s a disconnect between all the tools and the vertical applications, to scale interactions. And this is where Voice AI Space helps in sharing best practices, hints and tips on avoiding common mistakes, etc.
“There are one million vertical voice AI applications that have not yet been built.” Rob Pickering
I also referenced the work Claude Hayn is doing, harnessing the talent of the TADHack community to build out important vCon and Voice AI applications. That is enabling the shift from tools to money making applications.
Part of that shift is helping developers use open source tools, to take control and not be held hostage by any particular tool provider. This is something different to the early days of the web, it’s a democratization of voice AI around the world.
Rob backs up the importance of open source and open standards in building the market. The rate of change is accelerating as the ideas can spread around the world so much easier. Compare the speed of adoption of voice AI to WebRTC.
Best practices at scale at the current rate of change demands open source, open standards, and an open community (Voice AI Space) to make it happen.
T-bot highlights the importance of stopping robocalls and spam, as it is polluting an important channel for everyone. He ends on the importance of Voice AI in enabling universal access to knowledge, regardless of country or income level.