The startups featured in the Voice AI Startup Pitch Event, the panelists on the various panels such as healthcare and enterprise AI governance, and other information on the upcoming conference is available there.

With Cyara and the Contact Center AI Association, I’ll host a special webinar tomorrow discussing the results from a recent CX survey that produced some interesting insights on how enterprises are investing in AI.

You can register for it here - registration gets the audio and video recordings emailed to you, even if you’re unable to make it live.

Our friends at Modulate released a new deepfake detection model called Velma which has been highly reviewed since launch. They’ll speak more about it at Project Voice 2026, but you can read more about it here.

There’s a free half-hour online event this coming Tuesday (2/24) discussing synthetic voice from both a marketing point-of-view, as well as an operational one. Will be a great discussion I’ll host with ReadSpeaker’s Matt Muldoon.

The recordings will be sent to all registrants, so sign up even if you can’t be there to get those emailed to you.

The registration link is here.

Thank you! Bradley

When I first saw VoiceAISpace.com, a new and indispensable resource for those interested and working with voice AI, I was blown away.

Huge database of voice AI companies. Large library of tutorials. Event listings, job board, and other community aspects all there. Backed by voice OGs like Bespoken and relative newcomers like Vapi.

But who created this? The latest voice AI resource and clear successor to Bret Kinsella’s seminal Voicebot.ai?

That would be T-Bot.

Otherwise known as Thibault Mardinli, who lives in Toulouse, in the south of France.

“Many cool things have happened (since creating VoiceAISpace.com), but one of my favorites is watching people gather, create connections, and build relationships. Events have been my job for quite some time, despite the stress, I stick to it because, in my humble opinion, nothing beats helping people have fun and meet each other.

Having the opportunity to chat with early-stage founders, as well as those leading established startups at the forefront of innovation, is also something I feel incredibly lucky to do.”

Speaking of events, as well as opportunities to network with early-stage founders, I invited T-Bot to come state-side in April for Project Voice 2026: A Decade of Conversational AI. He’ll speak as part of the conference program on how he put the website together, trends he’s seeing within voice AI, and more.

My primary interest in voice came from the ability to access knowledge in the easiest way possible.

My neurons started firing when I realized, after talking to ChatGPT, that the entire knowledge base absorbed by AI was suddenly accessible without needing a screen or keyboard.

While exploring the topic, I got hooked by all the use cases…specifically in education and medicine, two disciplines that [could] transform the world we live in.

Do yourself a favor and take the time to peruse this website, which has very quickly become a very important and well-trafficked destination related to voice AI. Don’t forget to bookmark it as well.

Today is the final day of early bird registration for Project Voice 2026, taking place April 27-28 in Chattanooga TN. Registration is available here.

The past few years, this event has been strictly invitation-only. This year is the first since COVID where we have opened up some amount of registration to the public.

Feel free to use the promo code VOICEAISPACE to save 20%, even on early bird prices, while they remain.

Modulate is a venture-backed voice AI startup in Boston that first made a name for themselves within the massively multiplayer video game world, as their AI tools were used for moderating communication within the Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto franchises.

Having conquered the entertainment world, they expanded to support contact center operations in various fields, zeroing in on banking and insurance.

Earlier today, they released an entirely new architecture called the Ensemble Listening Model (ELM), which eschews ‘flattening’ voice into a transcript, and thereby losing a large degree of nuance, and instead orchestrates numerous models all in one singular effort to more fully interpret real-world conversations.

Modulate goes further to demonstrate how its new ELM, called Velma 2.0, outperforms everybody from OpenAI to Gemini to ElevenLabs.

I am including the company’s press release here - it is worth reading.

But even more interesting are the accompanying comparative graphics, all four of which I am including below.

You can learn more about their research and findings at EnsembleListeningModel.com.

You can follow along with all the announcements and news from the show here, via CNET.

Project Voice 2026: A Decade of Conversational AI (April 27-28, Chattanooga TN) registration officially opens

For the first time since COVID, the Project Voice namesake conference will not be strictly invitation-only, but will have some amount of registration open to the public.

Adam Cheyer (Siri co-founder, VP of AI for Airbnb, and venture partner for Project Voice Capital Partners) will keynote, and Amazon is the Presenting Sponsor. The Voice AI 100 will be honored as part of the proceedings, and somewhere between 400-500 folks working with voice and conversational AI will attend.

USA TODAY and Wired are among press already registered to attend, and speakers for the 1.5-day program will include Coca Cola, Humana, and the CIO of the State of Tennessee.

You can learn more, and register for the conference, here.

PVCP VOX, the voice AI-centric venture fund, is available for potential investors via AngelList

The fund will invest in one voice AI-oriented startup per quarter, beginning later in Q1 2026, and extending for 12 consecutive quarters (through Q4 2028). Initial close for PVCP VOX is Wednesday, January 28.

The fund is the successor fund to the 2023 PVCP fund which invested in a number of conversational AI startups across the globe, and is co-managed by PVCP general partners Bradley Metrock and Marc Ladin.

You can learn more about PVCP VOX, and apply to invest, here.

Nikola Mrksic, CEO of venture-backed PolyAI, along with well-known industry figure Kane Simms of VUX World, will be there. I’ll host the conversation.

Register here to also receive the audio and video files of the conversation in your inbox after the event concludes.

This is a publication and data platform listing a thousand companies around the globe collectively working to move voice AI forward.

Version 1.0 of this resource has been made available at no cost, and is available for free here.

All future versions with error corrections, company additions and subtractions, hot companies to watch, new data fields (e.g. HQ address, phone, email contact, fundraise status/milestones, etc) will be made available to paid subscribers.

You can subscribe to The Voice AI 1000 here, with complimentary registration to Project Voice 2026: A Decade of Conversational AI (April 27-28, Chattanooga TN) included with annual subscriptions while supplies last.

Conference registration for this 10th anniversary event next year, valued at $750, can’t be purchased or acquired any other way.

Monthly subscriptions to The Voice AI 1000 are also available, but don’t receive the bonus.

For all paid subscribers, Version 1.1 of The Voice AI 1000 will be released Monday, July 21.

I’ll host a webinar with NLX CEO Andrei Papancea, along with a surprise industry guest, on Wednesday, July 9.

Andrei will show NLX’s newest product, Voice+, and how it handles complex business processes with ease. The industry guest, along with me, will react in real time to the demo.

You can register for this webinar here, and all registrants receive audio and video files from the proceedings afterward via email to enjoy on demand.

1. The Big Book of AI Vendors, 2025 North American Edition releases January 8. This rather unique resource catalogs over 4,000 companies working with AI in one way or another, across all industries and stages of growth.

   

   The book will be available in print and digital formats on Amazon beginning January 8, but can be pre-ordered now through December 18 through Project Voice directly for $10 off (and with free shipping within the US and Canada).

   
   The link to pre-order the book is here.

2. This Wednesday, December 4 (1 PM Eastern / 10 AM Pacific) will feature a compelling conversation on AI within customer support between John Walter, President of the Contact Center AI Association, and Karaline Venezia, Chief Revenue Officer of Capacity. I’ll moderate the half-hour discussion.

   
   Capacity has made waves by doing something interesting: they’ve gone out and acquired eight different AI companies, synthesizing them into one singular customer support platform.

   
   This strategy, alone, put into action makes this conversation worth tuning in for.
   
   Register for the webinar here.

   
   If you’re not able to make it, but you find it of interest, register anyway to get the recordings emailed to you shortly after it wraps up.

   

   Lots of news to come early in 2025. Will be a fun year.

   
   Thanks for reading and enjoy the holidays!
   

John Walter (President, Contact Center AI Association) and Raj Gupta (CTO, Cyara) join me for a half-hour conversation.

Should you be busy at the time or unable to catch the whole thing, registrants get the audio and video recordings emailed to your inbox afterward.

The link to register is here: https://tinyurl.com/y6r736j9

Hope to see you there.

Bradley

Both can be signed up for now, with registrants receiving audio and video files afterward for on-demand viewing.

Bringing Conversational Intelligence to Healthcare is a half-hour webinar I’ll moderate on Wednesday, October 2, featuring Amy Brown, CEO of healthcare AI startup Authenticx, and Yaa Kumah-Crystal, health IT director and assistant professor of biomedical informatics for Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The discussion will focus on the opportunities for AI to enable evolved healthcare delivery, and how technology leaders can take a strategic approach to implementation.

Registration for Bringing Conversational Intelligence to Healthcare is here. The webinar will broadcast live at 3 PM Eastern / noon Pacific.

Sources of Truth: Best Practices For Deploying Accurate, Aligned AI is a half-hour webinar I’ll moderate on Wednesday, October 16, featuring Raj Gupta (CTO, Cyara) and John Walter (President, Contact Center AI Association).

This webinar will center around some brand-new AI tools that Cyara is bringing to the market to help provide reliability and consistency to AI sources of truth. Webinar attendees will get to see a demonstration of this new product suite a week before it releases to the public.

Registration for Sources of Truth: Best Practices For Deploying Accurate, Aligned AI is here. The webinar will broadcast live at 1 PM Eastern / 10 AM Pacific.

Salad introduces the lowest priced Transcription API in market

A $79 one-time payment for 100 hours of transcription per month FOREVER? 

That's the introductory launch offer from Salad Technologies for their Transcription API, the lowest priced API in the market today. 

Powered by open-source Whisper Large v3 with premium accuracy on a distributed cloud, prices for the API start from $0.06/hour.  

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This summer, St. Louis-based Capacity, an AI-powered support automation platform, went out and acquired one of my favorite companies in the synthetic voice space, CereProc.

CereProc, helmed by industry veteran Paul Welham and based in the UK, had this to say in the formal press release:

"The right speech tools are essential for Contact Center efficiency. CereWave AI, our advanced synthetic speech engine, is easily embeddable and customizable with a voice of a customer's choice, making it an ideal enhancement in a complete solution like Capacity," said Paul Welham, CEO, CereProc. Welham will continue to lead Cereproc and serve as a member of the Capacity executive leadership team following the acquisition.

Meanwhile, NYC-based NLX, led by CEO Andrei Papancea, snapped up Radish Systems, a company whose technology I’ve fondly mentioned previously in this newsletter and created a wonderfully elegant multimodal solution that was looking for a long-term home.

Well, they found it. From the NLX press release:

NLX®, the AI platform powering advanced conversational experiences for the world’s most admired brands, today announces it has acquired Radish Systems and its patented ChoiceView® technology which seamlessly adds visual interaction on voice transactions to improve efficiency, user experience, and accessibility for customer service inquiries. This complements NLX’s proprietary technology which includes its industry-leading, patented multimodal capabilities.

Three takeaways from these acquisitions:

1. Prepare for more consolidation within voice AI. There’s too many players these days within every facet of the voice value chain to be sustainable. Savvy CEOs will act decisively when they see partners aligned with them.

2. Macroeconomic pressure on M&A will remain high the rest of 2024. A volatile political atmosphere along with currency pressure here in the US and abroad is creating turbulence for AI startups. Finding an exit may not be easy.

3. AI companies still yearn for marketing differentiation. The global marketplace still struggles to discern which AI provider is better than the others, as storytelling and comparative analysis around solutions is immature. These sorts of acquisition opportunities provide vast surplus value as a marketing device that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Look for a more regular publication schedule of This Week In Voice VIP beginning in September. Enjoy the rest of the summer.

The Big Book of AI Vendors (2024 North America Edition) will contain over 4,000 companies, listed in alphabetical order, and will be akin to a 'Yellow Pages' for AI.

Companies can pay a nominal fee for upgraded listings and the book will be published in print and digital formats on November 12, at which point it will be circulated by us to over 1800 higher educational institutions, 500+ trade associations, and execs in North America possessing the title "Chief AI Officer," among others.

Given the almost non-existent discoverability of AI companies and incredible noise on anything related to AI, something like this should be useful to a wide variety of people starting from day one. I've already found it immensely useful simply in being part of putting it together.

ProjectVoice.ai has information on upgraded listings as well as the ability to pre-order, if you're based in the US or Canada. (You'll need to wait until the book is available to pre-order on Amazon sometime later in September if you're in other geographies.)

We’ll be back toward the end of July with some additional announcements.

Enjoy the summer.

Country legend Randy Travis was given a 2% chance of surviving the devastating stroke he had in 2013. He beat the odds, but he lost his voice in the process due to aphasia: the part of his brain responsible for speech and language was permanently damaged.

So it would likely come as a surprise that, this week, Randy Travis is charting with his first new single since his stroke, a song made possible by AI but possessing the authenticity of one of the nation’s most decorated musical artists.

Take a moment to watch:

There’s a lot to glean from the piece, but the one thing that stands out the most is the reactions of the various people hearing Travis’ new song for the first time.

Alongside the unadulterated joy is a distinct absence of anybody caring to what extent AI was or was not involved in creating the song, nor do you hear any whispers in this entire piece of whether AI’s involvement ‘should’ or legally needs to be disclosed. There also is absolutely zero discussion on any future repercussions of using AI technology in this way, to extend Randy Travis’ career.

These aren’t oversights in the piece. Rather, they simply reflect the truth: as a society, we’re quite willing to overlook any potential ethics issues if we view the utility gained from a technology is high enough.

Join us for QA Copilot: Using AI To Improve Conversations on Wed May 15 2024 at 1:00 PM Eastern / 10 AM Pacific as the Contact Center AI Association's President John Walter and Balto's CEO Marc Bernstein discuss the art and science of improving customer conversations. Hosted by Project Voice's Bradley Metrock.

Webinar registrants will receive the audio and video of the webinar recording, after the event concludes, for on-demand playback.

Learn more about Balto's AI-enabled QA Copilot, in advance of the webinar, here.

CereProc, who pioneered the concept of creating a synthetic voice to replace a voice lost to illness and did so for celebrity film critic Roger Ebert well over a decade ago, this week announced a major software update to their voice engine. You can read more about that here.

Kairos is a one-day summit discussing the intersection of AI and Christianity, taking place in the same location as Project Voice’s annual conference - the Edney Innovation Center in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee. Registration for this is currently open and I’m excited to host and moderate something a bit more personal.

Project Voice 2025 will follow the same smaller, invitation-only format it did this year. Dates for next year’s conference are set: April 28-29. If you’d like to attend, reach out.

The case for optimism he presents around AI is so well articulated, it will change the way you think about the subject.

Watch here:

The program for next week’s Project Voice 2024, which has been available online here, is now in a single graphic and available here. The annual conference has been slimmed down considerably to a single-track format and is invitation only.

Back from NYC yesterday where I hosted An Evening of CX and AI in NYC, a gathering of executives working to apply AI to customer experience within the enterprise.

Everyone had a chance to share how they and their organizations are thinking about AI, where they see opportunities, and where they see challenges. It was an eye-opening discussion, followed by great food and fellowship among peers.

Thanks to Cognigy for making possible such a highly memorable evening.

Project Voice 2024 has gone smaller (250 registrants) and invitation-only this year, moving to the nearby Edney Innovation Center and out of the Chattanooga Convention Center.

The main change, however, is the focus on “AI buyers,” Fortune 1000 or equivalent organizations that know they’re investing in AI within the enterprise significantly over the next 6-12 months. Over 100 organizations that did over $500M in revenue last year are registered to attend, spanning all industry verticals.

Merve Hickok, a leading AI ethicist here in the US and President of the Center for AI Digital Policy, leads off day 1 alongside Vineet Khosla (the Washington Post’s new CTO) and Hina Dixit (Partner at Microsoft’s M12 venture fund), while day 2 (half-day) begins with John Walter (President of the new Contact Center AI Association) and closes with Vanderbilt University’s presentation on how AI has enabled a fascinating initiative called the Slave Societies Digital Archive.

The full program is here (click “view event details” and then “view full agenda”).

The state of Tennessee continues its run of AI-related news by passing the ELVIS Act, otherwise known as the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, which criminalizes the use of AI imitating musicians and other artists without permission.

A person’s name, photo, and likeness was already protected under the law, but what makes this noteworthy is that this first-of-its-kind legislation extends that protection to someone’s voice, which now becomes the protected property of every individual.

The other noteworthy aspect of this legislation is how it is effortless it was for a specific lobby, in this case Nashville’s deep-rooted music industry, to move against the easy, polarizing target of AI. This law was unanimously approved - you should ask yourself how many laws these days at any level of US government are unanimously approved, and then the picture starts to get clearer on AI’s next hurdles to overcome.

I spent some time last month as an invited guest at Cyara Xchange out in San Diego. Cyara is a large testing/QA/QC company that has found itself in a fascinating position alongside numerous AI technologies that, we’ll say, desperately need testing/QA/QC partnership.

Rishi Rana, the company’s President (pictured below), gave an interesting presentation which included a slide on “The Five Phases of AI Adoption” which I thought was succinctly presented and worth sharing.

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Late in 2010, Taylor Swift’s illustrious career enjoyed a new first: she wrote a song to apologize to a former boyfriend, rather than simply air previous grievances.

The result was Back to December, a regretful and introspective song frequently cited as one of Swift’s most poignant and a distinct inflection point in her young career.

Swift admitted in an interview that the song is dedicated to an actual person to whom she had done wrong:

This is about a person who was incredible to me, just perfect to me in a relationship, and I was really careless with him.

Actor Taylor Lautner, an ex-boyfriend of Swift’s, later confirmed that the song was inspired by their relationship during a 2016 interview.

The song holds an interesting and telling place of honor in the firmament of Taylor Swift’s catalog of tunes: she went over a decade not performing it live at shows.

ElevenLabs, a synthetic voice company, has had an interesting last week or so.

First, they announced their $80M fundraise, anointing them as voice AI’s latest unicorn.

An eye-opening quote from that announcement:

“We raised the new money to cement ElevenLabs’ position as the global leader in voice AI research and product deployment,” CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch in an email interview.

I’m not sure being handed investor money is what cements a company’s leadership position, but ElevenLabs certainly has become a global leader in voice AI controversy.

The day after the company’s fundraising news was announced, news broke of ElevenLabs’ technology being used to create a deepfake of Joe Biden’s voice, which was deployed to interfere with the New Hampshire primary.

ElevenLabs then suspended the user who made the Biden deepfake.

This sequence of events is absurd, even for a company with the lengthy history of bad media coverage that ElevenLabs possesses.

ElevenLabs could have stopped this user from ever creating this fake robocall through a number of different methods. In not doing so, they ignored past security offenses from both the 2016 and 2020 US elections, among other incidents abroad.

You might ask yourself: why do we not hear more stories like this happening in US politics?

AI voices are everywhere. And the incentive to abuse them is everywhere as well.

So why has ElevenLabs been a lightning rod on the issue of voice AI misuse?

To answer that question, I’d take you back to 2022, when we had the joy of experiencing an AI-created podcast between Steve Jobs and Joe Rogan, without necessary permissions from anyone involved.

This publicity stunt was disgusting.

But what happened to the company itself that did it?

Glad you asked: absolutely nothing.

The media coverage they got from their fake podcast exceeds the sum total of anything else they’ve ever done, by an order of magnitude. They benefited greatly.

So when we look at ElevenLabs, and this latest breach of trust, why would we expect contrition? Or change?

This Biden deepfake incident, weirdly, is far from a problem. It’s actually a massive endorsement of the company’s technology, which clearly works quite well and has now been validated on a grandiose scale.

The only answer to bring this idiocy to a halt is harsh financial penalties and/or jail time for executives of repeat offender companies, akin to rules governing a bartender selling alcohol to underage minors.

It’s not a potential offender’s fault for seeing what they can get away with - it’s yours corporately for enabling it by failing to anticipate abuse.

Maybe this is the year we’ll see it happen. The industry needs it.

I am pleased to share I have joined the new Contact Center AI Association as Executive Vice President, Conversational AI. I’ll support the organization alongside my existing responsibilities related to the growth of both Project Voice as well as Project Voice Capital Partners.

The association aims to bring together CX leaders from within various cities across the United States, giving them valuable time and structure to network and share best practices. Initial chapters and meetings are planned for Atlanta, New York City, and San Francisco, with more to follow.

Conversational AI companies will be able to get involved in different ways to support the organization. If that’s of interest, let’s connect and I can share more detail. Additionally, the CCAIA will play a role in Project Voice 2024, our annual conference taking place in late April, where I’ll invite founder John Walter to speak in greater detail on the organization and its plans.

The team at Wysdom.ai put together an ebook discussing the warning signs your organization's efforts to measure success could use improvement. I found this resource insightful and wanted to pass it along - you can download it here.

OpenAI’s biggest announcement from their recent developer day was, to me, the ability to create your own GPT using a new tool called GPT Builder.

In OpenAI’s own words:

GPTs are custom versions of ChatGPT that users can tailor for specific tasks or topics by combining instructions, knowledge, and capabilities. They can be as simple or as complex as needed, addressing anything from language learning to technical support.

Even better, OpenAI is taking this concept a step further and will enable GPT creators to sell their creations in a new ChatGPT “App Store”:

Later this month, we’re launching the GPT Store, featuring creations by verified builders. Once in the store, GPTs become searchable and may climb the leaderboards. We will also spotlight the most useful and delightful GPTs we come across in categories like productivity, education, and “just for fun”. In the coming months, you’ll also be able to earn money based on how many people are using your GPT.

This mirrors how Amazon launched the Alexa ecosystem years ago. OpenAI will be able to get away with this “black box” model of not revealing how much they’re paying to developers, for what type of usage, for a little while until competition forces them to be transparent with this information. Hopefully, they’re better at enabling discovery of GPTs within their store experience than Amazon was as well.

For fun, I tried out OpenAI’s GPT Creator, using it to create PUBG Elite Coach GPT. This is a bot designed to give you information and insight related to PUBG, a famous video game that launched the “battle royale” genre.

I learned a lot in this process:

1. GPT Builder is very good at receiving natural language instructions on how to modify itself. I told my PUBG bot I wanted a “business-like” tone and for it to get directly to the point, as a general rule. I also gave it numerous instructions on what content to include and not include, which it seemed to incorporate effortlessly. The idea of telling a computer what to do, and it doing it, with the entire endeavor being this relatively frictionless experience, is inspiring.

2. The ability to reduce the conversational surface area of ChatGPT via these custom-created GPTs will be very valuable. There could be a GPT all about the Pythagorean Theorem, or all about the history of the San Francisco 49ers, or all about the evolution of Taylor Swift’s music, all of which someone could easily pay $.99 to learn much more quickly than one ever could by using a more current combination of a Google and YouTube search. Being able to converse with a bot deeply trained on one particular subject is a fascinating concept and likely to yield all manner of equally fascinating results in time.

3. One critical area where the system needs a lot more work is with images and user-provided resources. I first asked my new GPT to simply make available graphics of each map within the game that could be used in tandem with written answers to questions. GPT Builder then responded that, despite these images being publicly available and certainly within fair use, their own policy restrictions prevented these graphics from being shown or made available. So I then downloaded the images myself, re-named them, and uploaded them within GPT Builder as private files and instructed the GPT Builder to study these images thoroughly and make them available as discussion warranted with the users of this bot. It continued to struggle mightily between my demands to show images to users precisely when I want them shown, and it’s own predisposition to not want to show such images. It also through in random DALL-E image creations (most of which were wildly inaccurate to the game’s own assets) until I saw I could disable this function within GPT Builder itself. So, long story short, there’s still much more for OpenAI to work on here.

Every company has had its own internal discussions on whether to utilize ChatGPT and how that should work, with potential privacy and security tradeoffs in mind. There should now be entirely separate discussions on how companies should think about building their own GPTs.

It is easily past the point where every medium-sized company (and up) should have some dedicated person working with OpenAI’s technology, experimenting on behalf of the organization, and figuring out how to leverage it in a positive way.

There’s simply too much firepower here to ignore.

Conversational AI Marketing Opportunities (through Q1 2024)

This Week In Voice (Season 9) Podcast Sponsorship - $550/episode

Nov 9, Nov 16, Nov 30, Dec 7, Dec 14 available. 20 second exclusive live read. Reaches 30k-40k across 65 countries over 30 days (audio/RSS) + another 1k-2k via YouTube

This Week In Voice VIP Substack Newsletter Sponsorship - $550/issue

There will be 3 of these available between November 9 and end of 2023 calendar year - reaches 27k subscribers (average 25% open rate) plus available permanently on web

Conversational AI Executive Dinner for 20 People - $5,000 + travel/hotel

Whether at a conference for which your company is sponsoring/attending, or simply at a date/time/place of your choice, I will work with you on creating a list of 25 executives representing customers or potential customers you'd like to attend an AI-oriented executive dinner, reach out to them to secure their attendance (I'll invite 25 to ensure 20 are there), you'll pay for the dinner as well as my economy travel and a night of hotel if needed, and I'll co-host the evening with you and create a warm environment conducive to bringing these leads on board. These work very well and are something I'm doing more of these days, outside of our own conference in April.

Turnkey Webinar - $7,500

This is a completely turnkey webinar which we run for you - we create the registration portal, use our Zoom license, I host the whole thing, help you assemble a panel and secure executive participation from third parties as needed, and we promote through our various channels to help drive attendance. For more esoteric or niche conversational AI topics, we'll often have 50-100 attendees, and for more accessible or general topics, we'll have hundreds attend. Afterward we'll send you the registration list (name, company, title, email) and the audio/video files for your subsequent use and re-use. These work well and I do many of them throughout a calendar year.

Project Voice 2024 (April 22-23) Sponsorship - $12,500

Speaking spot + 2 passes to 250-executive invitation-only gathering + attendee list access 30 days in advance + suite of promotion. Often includes category exclusivity within relevant conversational AI subdomains. The structure of this conference is AI buyer-centric and is highly unique. Two of these remain.

The Sound of the Future connects the dots about this emerging paradigm to vividly illustrate how business leaders can stay ahead of the game, rather than scrambling to catch up, as voice technology gradually reveals its power.

Get your copy today.

It was well over a decade from John Lennon’s murder in 1980 when Yoko Ono called up Paul McCartney, letting him know of a discovery. A cassette tape had been found, containing some demos Lennon had recorded in the latter part of his life, while at home raising his son.

The remaining members of the Beatles were working on The Beatles Anthology, a massive retrospective project released in the mid-90’s consisting of a serial documentary, a three volume set of double albums, and a book.

Some songs were able to be salvaged and released as part of the Anthology effort. And one, in particular, simply had such poor fidelity that seemingly nothing could be done with it: a song called Now and Then.

Fast forward 20 years, and Peter Jackson - the director famous for The Lord of the Rings trilogy - had taken on the task of cutting a new Beatles documentary from the 60+ hours of unused footage from the band’s 1970 film Let It Be.

As part of this filmmaking process, Jackson’s team used AI to “de-couple” audio sources from each other and newly isolate them as independently recorded tracks. The original impetus for this was to be able to hear the band’s covert conversations they had inside the studio, which are (intentionally) obscured by instruments playing at the same time.

The technology would prove to be effective elsewhere, including in separating John Lennon’s vocals from his piano on the Now and Then demo…suddenly making it possible to add new contributions from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, an old guitar solo recorded decades ago by George Harrison, and officially have what will now be known as the Beatles’ final song.

The band also released this video, which combines new footage of the two remaining Beatles with all manner of old video footage, much of which is enhanced with AI in various ways.

The response to the video is similar to the response to Now and Then itself: it brings out a lot of emotion from fans of the band for which Beatles music was a soundtrack to most of life.

In a full-circle moment, the Beatles elected to package Now and Then, the final Beatles song, with Love Me Do, the Beatles’ very first song, in the single’s official release.

It should be noted why this is such a powerful moment for music fans: despite the fact that this new song was made possible by AI, it only matters because it is authentic. It’s an actual song, recorded by the actual band, enmeshed in the band’s actual history, authorized and endorsed by the entire constellation of Beatles’ decision-makers and estates.

A special human moment made possible by AI. Probably not the last.

Conversational AI Marketing Opportunities (through Q1 2024)

This Week In Voice (Season 9) Podcast Sponsorship - $550/episode

Nov 9, Nov 16, Nov 30, Dec 7, Dec 14 available. 20 second exclusive live read. Reaches 30k-40k across 65 countries over 30 days (audio/RSS) + another 1k-2k via YouTube

This Week In Voice VIP Substack Newsletter Sponsorship - $550/issue

There will be 3 of these available between November 9 and end of 2023 calendar year - reaches 27k subscribers (average 25% open rate) plus available permanently on web

Conversational AI Executive Dinner for 20 People - $5,000 + travel/hotel

Whether at a conference for which your company is sponsoring/attending, or simply at a date/time/place of your choice, I will work with you on creating a list of 25 executives representing customers or potential customers you'd like to attend an AI-oriented executive dinner, reach out to them to secure their attendance (I'll invite 25 to ensure 20 are there), you'll pay for the dinner as well as my economy travel and a night of hotel if needed, and I'll co-host the evening with you and create a warm environment conducive to bringing these leads on board. These work very well and are something I'm doing more of these days, outside of our own conference in April.

Turnkey Webinar - $7,500

This is a completely turnkey webinar which we run for you - we create the registration portal, use our Zoom license, I host the whole thing, help you assemble a panel and secure executive participation from third parties as needed, and we promote through our various channels to help drive attendance. For more esoteric or niche conversational AI topics, we'll often have 50-100 attendees, and for more accessible or general topics, we'll have hundreds attend. Afterward we'll send you the registration list (name, company, title, email) and the audio/video files for your subsequent use and re-use. These work well and I do many of them throughout a calendar year.

Project Voice 2024 (April 22-23) Sponsorship - $12,500

Speaking spot + 2 passes to 250-executive invitation-only gathering + attendee list access 30 days in advance + suite of promotion. Often includes category exclusivity within relevant conversational AI subdomains. The structure of this conference is AI buyer-centric and is highly unique. Four of these remain.

The Sound of the Future, by WillowTree President Tobias Dengel, releases tomorrow (via Hachette).

I had the privilege of reading an advance copy over the summer, and I spent some time re-reading the majority of it over the last week or so. It’s going to be on must-read lists for those going to work or currently working within AI for some time to come.

You can see my full review here.

The book can be found through major booksellers or an Amazon affiliate link is provided in the notes of the YouTube book review.

I’ll be moderating the discussion, which will be concise and clock in at approximately half an hour in length.

Registration for the webinar gets the audio and video files sent to you after the webinar concludes, for on-demand viewing later.

I’ll be back later this week with a more in-depth discussion of what OpenAI’s new voice integration means for conversational AI startups - it’s significant and merits a longer post.

Hope to see y’all tomorrow.