Latest / Convo AI World / Building AI Community with Voice AI Space
Transcript
- Hermes Frangoudis (00:07) Hi everyone, and welcome to the Convo AI World Podcast where we climb into the trenches and interview the teams building in the conversational AI space. I'm your host, Hermes Frangoudis. And today we have Thibault from Voice AI Space. Thanks so much for joining me Thibault. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (00:22) Hi guys. My pleasure, Hermes. Hermes Frangoudis (00:25) Yeah. So today I'm really excited to explore the space of Voice AI and like the whole ecosystem play that you've built. And I really want to give our, our viewers and listeners an opportunity to understand your journey. So please tell me like, what about your personal journey led you from building a Voice AI or voice tech startup to launching Voice AI Space as an open resource. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (00:47) My journey was more of a trial journey. I've tried to build a voice AI startup. We started two years and a half ago, super early when stuff were not as good as they are now. So lots of trial, error. I think we experienced so many stuff. We tested so many API. And at some point, we came to the conclusion that it was a better idea to stop. You know, when you work on a project, it's always like, like, ultra motivated. And when it stops, it can be quite painful as a founder. So I said to myself, instead of crying on myself and my future destiny, why not jump into a cursor, building like something that eventually could be helpful to someone? I had an ocean page filled up with information. I was like, okay, man, don't keep this private, share it. Maybe someone will like it and... And actually, it seems to be quite popular, so it's Hermes Frangoudis (01:47) So it struck a chord. So, which is really interesting topic. you're saying, many founders experience this, right? Like myself included, I had a startup, didn't work out so well. And you're like, we have all this great knowledge and learnings and how do we share this with the world and like bring it to light, right? And yeah. And, and that's really like kind of this like explorer mindset. Like I'm not just here to explore for myself and exploit, but I want to explore and share with the ecosystem. And Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (02:03) okay. Hermes Frangoudis (02:15) having that sort of mindset, like what does that look like day to day for you? Like how do you, how do you explore? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (02:21) It can be quite painful specifically for people around me, my girlfriend in particular. I'm super curious, like literally I'm super super curious. I'm not the only one and I think that's probably a quality of a founder. Many of us who are like into new technology or technology in general, you need to like digging deep. In my personal case, I believe it comes from my... kind of my education, we had no TV at home, we had a library. So it was always reading, reading, heads on the books, organizing the books. And I think I kept this and I'm passionate about learning. It gives a sense to life, whatever your life is. If you keep learning something new every day, life is cool. So, yeah. Hermes Frangoudis (02:50) learning. So it's always about keeping that, quenching that thirst for knowledge, right? Would you say? Yeah. So in terms of technical hurdles from content to audience, what are the hardest things to overcome in terms of getting started in this space? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (03:21) I would say it's quite weird, would say the imposter syndrome, in my personal view. The other stuff was like, this has a value, was like no one will care about this, there's no point to share this publicly. I could have literally kept improving the website for the next three years. It's a friend of mine who literally went like sharing it on LinkedIn. I planned to share it. I was like, yeah, I'm going to do launch. And I was like, no, I'm not going to do a launch. And my friend was like, mate, I've done your launch. And literally, why not this? Because literally, some companies that I'm listing, and most of them actually, I really admire what the people have built. Everyone in this industry is dealing with the technology, which is magical. AI is cool. There's a cherry on top of AI, which is voice AI. It's quite, how can I say? I always feel like super, not humble, but impressed when I can speak to founders or people like you in instance, who are in this industry since quite some time. so yeah. Hermes Frangoudis (04:17) It's awesome. It's like really about just making those connections and getting yourself out there and like putting yourself out there the first time. sounds like that's the biggest hurdle. And then it sounds like your friend helped you was like, hey, don't worry about the launch. got you. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (04:29) Yeah, you know, it's more like as a founder's mind, you overthink everything and we tend to do it because other people's judgment is quite important in a way. So, no, no, having friends who are pushing you is like always good and probably the key to success, being well surrounded by good people. ⁓ Hermes Frangoudis (04:48) Yeah, it's super important to be, to have that, that tight knit circle. So let's kind of shift gears and talk a little bit more about the platform itself. So Voice AI Space curates listings, like news, events. It's a knowledge base, right? How's the site architected to keep all that content current? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (05:05) It's a good question. It was really good when the platform was not launched because I had all my time to put stuff where I wanted and stuff. And now I feel this obligation of like, you need to add stuff. You need to be like always on top of everything. So those last week, I stepped back a bit from this duty to be always like focusing on the news, not only the news, but the new launch and stuff. We are trying to like automate as much as possible with the human-in-the-loop because I literally don't want like all the products to come into the platform. My personal thought, I think it's important to have someone to say, yes, this is cool or like this guy are dodgy. I don't want them in the platform. So I step back a bit from like all this, let's put some content, let's add some content, hopefully to get back in a better shape and even faster. And also because like I believe it's, in my vision, it's more than a platform. It can be like an ecosystem. I won't say central point because it's like super pretentious to say so, but it's an interesting resource. And I believe also that this type of process will fit perfectly with events or like everything that can be good for an ecosystem. So yeah. Hermes Frangoudis (06:14) No, it makes sense. It's a total ecosystem play, right? You're putting together something that helps describe the ecosystem, expand the ecosystem, bring awareness to elements of the ecosystem. Yeah, totally, totally makes sense. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (06:27) It's kind of media, so now I'm trying to go into this, but it requires lots of energy and time. It's still yet a kind of single-man job. I've got friends helping who are really cool. We have not funded startup or like, who haven't raised money or whatever, so it's like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, which is cool. I love it. Hermes Frangoudis (06:45) Very grassroots. No, that's awesome. So because you have this ability to curate, right? Like the stuff that's already on there, what criteria or signals do you really use to evaluate these tools or startups that you put on the platform? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (07:02) You may have seen I've got a sweet tooth for design since I'm a child. I love design since forever. I won't say that design is one of my way to judge if like some, let's say a startup should be in the Voice AI Space, but I put lots of attention to how the startup are communicating. One of my way to see if it's legit in a way is to go and dip every single link on the website. If like one link is dead, it means that the guy is like... there's something missing. And I'm super happy always to get back to the founder and say, mate, this is broken. Please fix it. I'm super happy to bring you in. And also, I really like to speak to the people behind the tech, if I can. If they are not too busy, I really like to connect. It takes lots of time, but it's really cool. So it's something global I can't really describe, but it's a mix of various factors. ⁓ And I've got my new goal. Hermes Frangoudis (07:35) Not keeping up. Okay. So, so it's more about just making sure they're legit and like you kind of vetting them and putting your personal understanding of how people present on the internet, right? And is this real or is this just like a dodgy graph? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (08:03) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And because like, you know, right now the space is getting lots of attention. So like everyone wants to build something. It becomes quite simple to build with Voice AI. So you've got plenty, plenty of people come to the market, which is cool. But some of them will probably do it for like two weeks, three weeks and move to something else like web three or whatever. I think it's my duty to make sure that like people who come specifically on the homepage. On the library are people where if as a client I visit the platform I can be sure that the guy who are listed are legit. I can reach out to them, can build a business with them, I can give them a call. I really don't want to have someone visit the platform to fall into a trap and getting like a scammer behind it or whatever. Hermes Frangoudis (08:47) Yeah. Or someone that just like built a proof of concept and then never built the full business behind it, right? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (09:05) Yeah, yeah, yeah. But regarding this, it's not very popular because I haven't advertised it yet. But in the lab, I've created something which is called the Launchpad. It's not because the startup is not yet a startup, and it's not because the project is still maturing that it doesn't have its place, I believe, in the ecosystem. I've been in the shoes with other founders who struggle a lot and goes through lots of stuff and is like, my product is not stable, I can't sell it. But I'd like people to speak about it because it will bring attention. And whatever your stage, you need attention. It's important to have people looking at you, thinking, yeah, maybe this guy, and maybe the first client to trust you, even if you're still a broken chicken. I don't know how to say. So I created this little space, a kind of product hunt, but at a way lower level, dedicated to this type of startup. The one who are launching, unsure of their success, but still want to test and see if there's a market. And there's no shame, I believe, to be on the testing phase and saying, like, it didn't work, let's move on. But in... Yeah. Hermes Frangoudis (10:12) No, it's the most important phase, right? Like being able to like bring to light, like this is what's going to turn into a business or this is not viable. And there's only one way to do that, is to test it. Yeah. And to bring it to life and to bring it to market. You said a funny thing there, like the chicken without the head, right? Is that, yeah. Yeah. I think the guys from the YC Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (10:19) Yeah. speaking out. ⁓ Yeah, at least she can, yeah, it's exactly what... Hermes Frangoudis (10:39) group, they have a podcast where they talk about this and they say, when you create something new, you basically have to go find your audience. And sometimes that audience is like the person whose hair is on fire. Like the person that so desperately needs something different that they're willing to look at the new guy in the room and say, do you know what? I'll give that a shot because clearly nothing else has worked on this front, right? And that's very important because those are the customers that are going to give you the best feedback. They're the ones that will take it, try it and go, actually, this didn't work, that didn't work, but this did. Like. Yeah, huge. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (11:14) Yeah, on this particular topic, I'd to, specifically in the States, people are maybe more keen to have this attitude. It's quite interesting to see different mentalities in the startup world adoption. Like, I love Europe, I love France, I've got nothing against my country and the place I'm living, I'm super happy to be here. But in terms of adoption, it's a bit more complicated. Hermes Frangoudis (11:18) Yeah. They're more conservative on this side, right? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (11:40) Yeah, yeah, people are waiting for you to be matured before giving you a chance. While after many discussions with founders, people in the States are way more like, this is new. Let's try it and let's give it a shot. So that's probably why I did the platform in English and not in French. Hermes Frangoudis (11:57) Makes sense, makes sense. In terms of like the companies that have come in, you mentioned you get companies putting themselves in trying to get into your site. What is one of the most surprising or maybe unexpected listings that you came across? Like something that you're like, whoa, this is really cool or like this exists, know, one of those. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (12:18) Alright, there's a few stuff, honestly a few products. I've got a small newsletter without pretension in which I'm speaking about the good, the bad and the sexy in voice AI. And in the sexy of voice AI it's not sexy in the sexy way, it's sexy in the funny way, funky, let's say it's better. Hermes Frangoudis (12:37) I know what you Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (12:41) I'm spotting some stuff that really cool. There's one guy that I really like. You will think that I'm in love with him because I keep speaking about him, but that's not the case. I've got a good friend. Daily, it's called Daily, Get Daily. Laclawn is a British guy. has set up something. Probably one of the best UI UX experience when it comes to voice. There's a other guys that I met who are building really cool stuff. We share to train people and companies on how to not be spammed by voice bots, which become a big problem in the industry. That's one stuff comes to mind and it's more related to like a personal story. I came across like two companies doing audio books, where basically you would speak to like, either like an assistant or no assistant, it's just you speaking. Hermes Frangoudis (13:17) Huge. Mm-hmm. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (13:33) and you can literally build your audio book and I believe it's super cool to be able to transmit your family knowledge through a simple way without having to sit in front of a piece of paper. I asked my father to do it so many times, he never did it and I wish he had. ⁓ Hermes Frangoudis (13:43) Very interesting. So it's like a way of like preserving your oral history to turn that into an audio book. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (13:55) Yeah, yeah. Audio or not audio? Actually, some of the startups, basically you speak, it's transcribing everything and then you can build something, you can print it. There's some really cool stuff. Hermes Frangoudis (14:08) Super interesting. And that's even more important nowadays because like preserving the knowledge of the past is like something I feel like with the evolution of screens and technology, we communicate differently and we don't have the chance to ask some of those same stories like that we would have. You know, I grew up in America. My grandparents were in Greece and Cyprus and it was not easy to learn those stories from them. Right. And I rely on my parents for that. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (14:14) Yeah. Yes, Same. Same. I wish I had like, like you, I'm mixed. I've got some family in Syria and same I wish I had like my grandmothers, my grandfather or grandmother doing this kind of stuff because like I could have, I could have even, it's a bit weird but spoken to them. Like, you know, like you cannot find it. Hermes Frangoudis (14:56) Yeah, that would have been amazing, right? Can you imagine having a conversation with an AI that is trained on their stories, on their past? It's almost like being able to kind of relive that interaction again. The emotional effort is crazy. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (15:05) Right. Alright. I know that some people will be shocked by this, I found it pretty cool as a use case, And to get back to your question, on a personal level, one of the reasons I really love Voice AI is education and medicine. When you think about it, you can literally bring to the mass at large scale education and medicine in a way that has never been done before in the entire human history. And the super interesting part is that you don't need internet, can navigate over the phone. And right now most of the world is covered by phone infrastructure. There's still the question of the cost, but when you are looking at some stuff, the costs are going to drop down drastically. So yeah, you can literally like... I don't know, think of a world where everyone will be equal in terms of education. And I truly believe this is like the key of a world where we all want to live in, a place where everyone has access to education in the same way. Hermes Frangoudis (16:12) The democratization of education and knowledge is massive. And the things you're talking about, the being able to connect even via the phone, we're doing stuff like that with our, we've created like a PSTN gateway. So you'd like call in and talk to the AI via like a number, right? Which is awesome. You don't need to just go to the website. It's no longer limited to this one avenue of entry. So super interesting. I agree with you. think this space. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (16:24) Okay. ⁓ it's very good. Hermes Frangoudis (16:41) has the potential to completely revolutionize the way we learn and experience and interact, especially with like the promise that we were given early on on the internet. The promise was the world's knowledge in your hand. And it is, but you still have to sift through it. And now with voice AI, you no longer have to type. You can talk to it naturally. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (16:48) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. And there's this idea of active learning actually, which is way better than, you know, a fixed screen on YouTube. It's cool to learn on YouTube, but you're not active, you're passive, you're getting the knowledge. Yeah. Hermes Frangoudis (17:17) You only get the first step, right? Like you watch and observe, but then there's that whole next part. That's the interactive. Yeah. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (17:22) Yeah, yeah. And there's an interesting, I think it's in Harvard, they tested a course where an AI was kind of giving the course, not to say that it will replace the teacher, teachers are like crucial in the educational system. But apparently the results were literally amazing. The outcome of this personal teacher, this personal assistant for the students were really good. I'm really optimistic about this. Hermes Frangoudis (17:48) Great. Just kind of switching tracks a little bit. From your vantage point, which of the voice AI sub-segments are really heating up the fastest? Would you say like the race is on in STT, TTS, voice cloning, or do you think there's like the broader space of agents? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (18:07) I think voice cloning is booming quite a lot. You may have read this something yesterday. There's a lot on this. Everything is booming. Speech to speech, probably. Not booming yet, but it will probably be the next big boom, big iteration. Honestly, it's like if everything is booming, like the entire ecosystem is literally on fire and every day you're like, oh no, there's new stuff every day which is super cool. It's amazing and that's the beauty of like, it's not competition, but it's the beauty of human like trying to innovate and to be leading. The entire space is buzzing. Hermes Frangoudis (18:31) Yeah, like when you think this is going one way, the next one launches off, right? It's just. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (18:48) I'm a big believer in edge and small language model. And I can't wait for this iteration. Google lately released some really cool stuff related to this. I don't know what will be the outcome of this. But now I'm super excited in particular about edge and small language model, where less the consummation in terms of energy are lower. Hermes Frangoudis (19:11) So So really reducing that latency. So this whole space is on fire. Everything is popping off, right? What do you think are the most underrated emerging use cases and things that maybe operators, investors, people should be really keeping an eye on in this space? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (19:31) It's a tough question man. I will say from my personal point of view and it's from my experience. When I started my project failed, my bet was no one will give a damn about the worker. Okay, everyone will be for the call center. Everyone will be solution, B2B solution will be addressed to the company itself and not to the people on the ground. And if you look at Ayola as an example of startup in Israel, they are building a literally something that helped the floor worker, the people who are on the ground. And that was more or less the idea of my startup, helping like I was really deep into like focusing on large scale events. How can we improve all the processes, all the communication, all the access to knowledge because an event is just a pile of knowledge that you have to share with suddenly 100 people and making sure they are all aligned. So this specific use case of like not addressing the ultra scalable solution. Which at the end is not true because actually if you think about it, like floor people, field workers are mass, you know? And I've seen there's a new stuff, I'm having a catch up with the founder of a company who is launching the product soon. They are focused on field worker. I'm super excited about it because I truly think that there's not that many solutions, there's few stuff for sales people. Who are like, you know, always on their laptop or stuff. But I want to see more for, you know, the people who work during COVID on the ground, we like, we can also, yeah, frontline workers. Hermes Frangoudis (21:15) The frontline workers, right? Like the people that are not traditionally super tech. Yeah. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (21:21) Yeah, yeah. Actually, Voice AI is perfect for this because you can switch your entire software or all your reporting or all your stuff can be automated thanks to voice AI. Hermes Frangoudis (21:31) True. It's true. So really the emerging use cases is how does, how does voice and that sort of interface revolutionize and change the field of play for the person actually operating, right? Like the person on the ground that doesn't traditionally use technology, but now you don't need to learn how to use like a complex app. You just talk to this thing and it knows and it's fixed to do your specific thing. Right. Huge. So speaking about your past efforts around events, Voice AI Space isn't just a directory where you publish like the trends and, and founder spotlights. You do events with this, right? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (22:16) done one... I've worked in events most of my life. I started at 20 years old when I was in London, when I moved to London. I've done a little meetup a months ago with my girlfriend. I said to my girlfriend, darling, let's go to London, let's go back to London for a weekend and let me try to gather a few people. But it was literally from one day to another, I shoot a message on LinkedIn. No planning, nothing, literally. We arrived in London, now we need to find a place, it's tomorrow. Probably the worst ever events I've planned in my life. And it was quite cool, eight of us, founders speaking about voice. Honestly, it was amazing. And now, a few days ago, was like, man, I need to go back to this because that's my true passion. Voice AI is definitely one of my passions. Events is probably one of the coolest job on Earth. Your job is to bring people together. And you sweat a lot as an events manager, but when you look at the others, you're like, man, look at all these miles, these people connecting. And I really enjoy looking at people, making friends and stuff. So yeah, I'm planning an event. I hope I don't think I'm doing a mistake because I know the job. But the time frame is really short, so I'm like putting myself into an interesting position where I have to rush a lot and put all my expertise into building something really cool in less than 20 days. That's my challenge. But I can do it easily. I've planned so many events and I'm surrounded by the best people I know. So I'm not worried. And just on this, it will be in London. In person on the 8th of August. I'm super happy, will announce the place. The place is honestly... I got the name, I know where it is, no one knows yet, except people I work with, it's super cool. And then I'm working on the second part, which will be an online conference, because I truly think it's a bit frustrating when you're not in SF to see everything happening in SF. Hermes Frangoudis (24:18) Thank Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (24:33) People in India, in the Middle East, all over the world. Come on, we need to be a huge family gathering and chatting like we do now. And online is perfect for this. So I'm also planning on the day after to have a little catch up for voice founders or voice aficionados online. Hermes Frangoudis (24:56) Nice. So you said August 8th in London? Nice. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (25:00) London, in person in London and August 9th on a platform online in a platform. I've been testing like plenty different platforms over the last days. I built the events website actually myself, went back to coding. Hermes Frangoudis (25:04) Online. That's super exciting. And I think with the hunger that exists for knowledge in this space, like the events have great, great turnout. Like people are interested in just like showing up in person and being alive and being like, that's the best way to learn about the newest things. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (25:20) Thank Yeah, actually, you learn way more by speaking to a founder or to a mate than by reading the news because you know what's happening tomorrow. And it's easier to catch up the entire ecosystem vibe if you go in one place where everyone is. And also, believe, you know, there's this stuff of, in a way, America versus Europe versus the rest of the world. And it's interesting to find a way to bridge all of this because we can all learn from each other. There's a way to perform much. There's so many steps that can be done and I'm super happy if I can, at my small level, participate to this. Hermes Frangoudis (26:09) So. Speaking of the regions, where do you think the pace in adoption is moving up the fastest? Because I know in Europe, a lot of companies are looking for slightly more maturity and work maybe a year or so, maybe a little over a year into the original LLMs coming out. So we've got to assume that businesses are really exploring. Text-based LLMs, but now it's conversational AI is booming, like voice AI is booming. Do you think North America is really like leading it or do you think APAC is starting to pop off in a way that's going to be that everyone should be looking at? Or do you think there's really something in Europe that people are underestimating? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (26:51) I think America will always be leading, there's no doubt about it. You've got San Francisco probably the most brilliant mine and you've got the capital, which helps a lot actually. In France we've got some really cool stuff in terms of research. We are quite known to be good mathematicians, we've got some literally like smart ass guy from QTI as an example, they are mad. But in terms of adoption, if you ask me, I've worked a few times in the Middle East. I remember people chatting openly, blah, blah, blah, to their phone. And in terms of habits, I think in the Middle East, and maybe in Asia, but I can't tell because I've spent enough time in Asia. I think in the Middle East, will be quite fast to adopt it? I'm looking at many platforms, there's a released that are coming up. And what I heard from the founders is that, yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. There's a market and there's a specific challenge which is training the voice. Look, there's Amsa who is doing an amazing job at training voice on the Arabic dialect. It's super cool. And once you've got this and when you fit in this market, I think they're into something big because probably American companies won't focus into the Syrian dialect, no one cares about that. Hermes Frangoudis (28:07) huge. mean, it just operationally doesn't really align with probably what they're doing versus companies in market that can now take this technology, customize it to their market. And there's a lot of opportunity there, right? Like people in the Middle East are tech hungry and tech that's focused on them is few and far between, I think. So I think seeing stuff in their own native language would take off. could easily beat out the Western. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (28:39) Yeah. Yeah. And Well the population is young, they've got the money, the petrol, so they've got everything in place to be probably leading the next round of evolution. And specifically in a governmental way, you can tell that they are really adopting AI. They are like, OK, no regulation, let's go YELLA. And it's impressive. Hermes Frangoudis (29:10) That's the other part of it is like the governments there are probably like, here, let's take a step back to allow this to grow and see where it goes, right? Because if other people or other countries are tamping down on certain regulations and making it harder, it creates different business opportunities. yeah. Very interesting to see how the landscape shifts with major technological revolutions like this. It's quite amazing. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (29:28) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, because I remember it was two years ago, Yann LeCun published, it was an article speaking about the adoption of, no, the vision. It was a study about how people were perceiving AI. Do you think AI is good? Do you think AI is bad? It was something very simple. France was obviously at the bottom. I think only 30 of us were. Hermes Frangoudis (29:58) More conservative. Yeah, that's fine. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (29:59) Yeah, we are Not conservative. We like criticism. It's a quality, think, like we are Cartesian. When we see something, it's not like, oh, it's amazing. It's like, okay, let me question why. What's the problem with it? It's our mentality. It's like this. And what was surprising in this study is that India, China, people in the Middle East were having the highest rates, not the government, even the people. They were extremely high in terms of, yeah, it can bring the good. It can help our society to go faster, better, and stronger to put the tough back. Hermes Frangoudis (30:36) I think it's very interesting. In terms of like your site, if someone says, hey, you're inspiring me to jump into voice tech, what resources would you really point them to first? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (30:45) What I will say is a bit strange. I should not say it probably, I will point them to AI. I will say your best teacher is an AI, so use AI as much as you can to learn, to practice. And now in terms of resources, there's lots of communities who have some amazing resources. You can literally get some tutorial on, you go to GitHub, do a research on GitHub about Voice AI open source repository. And if you're not technical enough to get there, you've got all these platforms that really good. Agora is one of them where you can literally build without a deep, deep, understanding of all the magical stuff happening in the niche. And so yeah, knowledge. YouTube is a great place. Communities. But I will be careful with the one who have to pay a lot. Yeah, YouTube, like AI, definitely. Hermes Frangoudis (31:44) Make sense. mean, YouTube is, or YouTube and AI are like my go-tos. Like I go on YouTube, I watch someone talk about it so I can learn the terms, learn some of the concepts, and then you can go ask the AI to really like kind of explain it and dig down. You know the best part? No judgment. You can ask the dumbest question and it'll just answer it. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (31:44) and podcasts. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, you You know, sometimes I've got a crappy memory, I start to get old. And sometimes, you know, if it was with a teacher asking again and again the same question, it would be annoying. Yeah, you can ask it 25 times, we will always be pleased to give you the answers, which is super cool. Hermes Frangoudis (32:21) Yeah, no, it's amazing to have that patience, right? Which is what a lot of people need in life is just the patience for someone to answer it in a way that your brain can wrap itself around the concept because we all learn differently. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (32:32) Yeah, ⁓ Definitely. Hermes Frangoudis (32:36) So looking out maybe a year or two from now, since you're pretty fresh on launch, what role do you really see like Voice AI Space taking in the broader AI landscape? I know we talked earlier about like ecosystem play. Do you have a plan? Are you just kind of seeing where, where this space takes you and adapting on a, on a more like low level? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (33:01) I think the best plan is to have no plan. I've planned so many stuff with previous startups that I've tried to launch, the big business plan. It was beautiful and useless. So I slowly start to see signal of where I should go because people tell me, this is extremely useful. Please keep doing this. I won't jump only into this because I believe the mission... Literally, I want to keep this kind of mission that I gave myself to like people not to face what I've faced myself. Literally, being lost on the web, testing too many stuff, spending hours researching and facing marketing copy. So now I'm not yet there, but the next step and the next iteration will be tutorial, tutorial, tutorial, tutorial, tutorial in a really specific manner. Because I've got my way to think about how a tutorial should be made in the age of AI. And yeah, probably that being as much as I can, it's not about like, I don't know, finding like, I always say to myself, I've recruited lots of people in my life. I've been a manager since I'm 21 years old. I've recruited lots of people and I think there's nothing more rewarding than helping someone to get a job, helping someone to feed his family, helping someone to put a feet in an industry. That you enjoy more than the previous one. So I've got a sweet tooth for all the jobs, job board, training and all of this. But there's other stuff like events. Definitely I love events. It's really good. Stressful but good. And yeah, the media side of it, like interviewing, speaking to podcasts, one day I'm gonna be as famous as you, my dear Hermes, my own podcast. No. Hermes Frangoudis (34:41) More famous, hopefully. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (34:44) And now you're like chatting to people. And I've got a core value that it's not all about the money. Money is important. Money is cool. I've got no issue with it. But it's not all about the money. And if your mission is nice, go. I believe you go. Perfect example. When I started this, I had a business plan in mind. I will probably not be where I am now. I've done all of this work for free, now I'm like, yeah, if you want to be a sponsor, sponsor me because I need to make a living. Hermes Frangoudis (35:20) So hopefully at some point you monetize because we need to make sure you keep doing this space, keep moving things forward, right? It's not all about the money, but we need you to survive at the end of the day. ⁓ Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (35:27) success to... ⁓ I started, I already started with sponsors and so I started to make a living and I really want to take this occasion to thank one person in particular who has been the first one and he's always the first one actually, John from Dispoken. There's few people in the industry who came up to me and said, mate, what you do is cool. I'm like, okay, can we help you? And I was like, yeah, if you want, what do you, you want to code with me? No, no, no, can I help you? How do you live? like, no, not making money from it. It's a particular topic, but just a big thank you to John. Even like, I remember speaking to Brooke from Coval at the beginning. She was really kind and many people like, reached out and was like, Walter from Twilio. If I can put many names out and I'm gonna forget many, I should stop doing it. Hermes Frangoudis (36:02) Mm-hmm. Let me go grab you an award real quick so you can keep naming everyone. But just kidding, just kidding. The community is actually like a big thing that I find very interesting within the AI space is everyone is just like, as you said, willing to help and to think about like each individual person, like to name them would probably be pretty hard at this point. It takes a village Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (36:33) What? ⁓ Hermes Frangoudis (36:52) to grow together, right? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (36:54) I'm working on something related to this. I won't speak about it. I'm building a globe, where people can put themselves on. It's a stupid idea that I wanted to test through JS. Hermes Frangoudis (37:07) That sounds fun, sounds super fun and 3JS is really cool. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (37:11) Yeah, I don't get anything like which is happening behind the scene, but I'm super happy to see you sphere like, know, I'm like, I did this. Sorry for the developer guys. I'm not a good dev. I'm just like building stuff as I go. Hermes Frangoudis (37:19) The is amazing. If you're, if you're shipping code, you're a good dev. That's how it works. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (37:27) Yeah, yeah, Claudio is good. No, you're right, actually. And yeah, make some good spaghetti, but at the end of the day, do the job and I'm pretty happy with what I've done. So yeah. Hermes Frangoudis (37:38) Awesome. So here's a little bit of a wild card. If you weren't doing what you are doing today, what would you be doing in the voice AI space or in the AI space in general? Is there any other areas or passions that you have? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (37:53) Outside of voice and AI? Hermes Frangoudis (37:55) Outside of voice AI, like in the broader AI space. So let's say like you, you weren't doing this. Where else do you think you'd be playing around? Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (38:03) Medicine has always been in my interest. I've never been able to study enough and to be focused enough to become a doctor. But definitely, we are facing, thanks to AI, a huge shift in terms of like progress, medical progress. And this has all my interest. The CEO of Nvidia, one day was speaking, I remember looking at him speaking, was nearly crying, saying like, my company is participating to the fact that biology is turning from a science to an engineering concept. With AI, we can literally push stuff way further in terms of knowledge, in terms of everything. I would probably be digging deep into how AI can help in medicine. That's something really like, it's my... Hermes Frangoudis (38:54) Yeah, I think there's huge opportunity there, Like AI with looking at scans, MRIs, being able to pick up on details that the human eye just wouldn't catch, right? Great, great space. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (39:07) Yeah. Speaking back about medicine and AI, Google now can detect some disease with voice. Like it's mad. Like even the voice AI industry has some really good stuff to bring to the world in a way. Hermes Frangoudis (39:27) So using voice to detect different medical issues, cognitive issues, that sort of thing. Wow, that's amazing. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (39:30) Diabetes, I've read I read an article about diabetes, people are going deep deep deep. I hope I'm not saying like... but... Hermes Frangoudis (39:39) Yeah, no, no, interesting, interesting research in the fields, right? Well, we are coming up on time. I really appreciate you taking the time. I want to be cognizant of your time is important for you. And I want to say thank you so much, Thibault, for joining us today. If you haven't seen it, voiceaispace.com. Yep, voiceaispace.com. Check it out. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (39:46) Okay. to the pressure. ⁓ Yeah. And There's a blog coming, there's events.voiceaispace and blog.voiceaispace. I like to keep myself quite busy. So there's few stuff coming up soon. But, yeah. Hermes Frangoudis (40:13) Nice. Amazing, dude. And thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for everything you do in the Voice AI space. I don't think people thank you enough. So thank you. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (40:25) I'm not doing much man, come on. Don't be... I'm gonna... red. Hermes Frangoudis (40:29) So we'll see everyone next time. Thanks again. Thibault / T-Bot Mardinli (40:33) Ciao! Bye bye!