Smart Speakers Podcast

Dave Zohrob & Harish Agarwal•www.smartspeakers.fm

A podcast about Voice AI hosted by Dave Zohrob and Harish Agarwal, the cofounders of Chartable (acquired by Spotify in 2022). We interview founders, technologists, and investors at the frontier of voice AI applications, and share our startup journey along the way. More at https://smartspeakers.fm

www.smartspeakers.fm

Last refreshed: July 10th, 2025 at 5:49 AM ⓘ

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Episodes

The 500ms Dash—Nikhil Gupta, VAPI

Nikhil Gupta is the cofounder and CTO of VAPI. He’s been in the trenches building and scaling one of the biggest voice platforms in the world. On this episode, he explains how VAPI aims to create a voice-default future where we talk to all our computers—and goes deep into every step of VAPI’s voice pipelines and the technical challenges along the way. Some highlights: ☎️ Massive scale: VAPI has processed 44 million voice calls on their platform, growing from a COVID-era one-click Zoom meeting bu...

Apr 07, 2025•43 min

Your AI interviewer will see you now—Varun Khurana, Wayfaster

Varun Khurana wants every job candidate to have the best possible chance to prove themselves for every job they apply to. He’s been in the trenches building with voice AI for 2+ years, and had some great nuggets to share: * 💬 How Wayfaster started: “Wayfaster started out as a way to interview your entire pipeline in a couple seconds... the only way you can really do that is using voice AI." * ⛔️Why AI video avatars are a no-go: "We tried avatars and every candidate hated it... I think it just m...

Mar 31, 2025•40 min

The pipeline for voice—Kwindla Hultman Kramer, CEO of Daily

Much of my childhood was spent in my basement, dialing up other people’s computers to trade messages and play games. Kwin Kramer from Daily remembers that time, too—and says today's voice AI moment feels just like those early internet days. That sense of endless possibilities is back. His open-source project PipeCat has become the standard toolkit for voice agents. What began as an experiment now powers voice AI for OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and countless startups, making conversations feel natur...

Mar 24, 2025•57 min

The craft behind voice AI magic with Tom Shapland

This week, Tom Shapland shares his journey from agriculture tech to founding Canonical, a tool that helps voice AI developers understand and improve conversations by mapping call stages. Tom has deep experience in the voice world—we loved this conversation and we’re sure you will too! Links https://canonical.chathttps://x.com/Tom_Shaplandhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-shapland-b4494212/ Chapters 0:00 - Intro 1:05 - Welcome and first AI moment 3:03 - Computer vision for thirsty plants 5:50 - Exp...

Mar 17, 2025•46 min

Olivia Moore, a16z: Voice as a wedge

Voice AI is having its moment, but pretty soon every company will be a voice company. Olivia Moore is the author of a16z’s market report on voice AI agents , which is a must-read if you’re interested in the space. She’s an amazing thinker and we cover a lot in this conversation, including: * Olivia's thesis that Voice AI is in it’s “internet in 1999” moment * The "wedge" strategy: using Voice AI to get in the door before transforming broader business operations * How recruiting became a surprisi...

Mar 10, 2025•55 min

Voice AI for Healthcare: Phil Markunas, Standard Practice

We chat with Phil Markunas about his wild journey from Army staff sergeant to voice AI founder. Phil shares how Standard Practice evolved from a healthcare payment startup to building an AI assistant that handles complex insurance calls. Along the way, we learn about Phil's life in Japan, his Oreo obsession, and why he believes natural conversation is as hard as self-driving cars. I loved Phil’s concept of “success, but doof” — it neatly encapsulates just how hard it is to measure the success of...

Mar 03, 2025•43 min

Episode 1: ChatGPT lies to us

Smart Speakers is a podcast about voice AI. Our first guest is, of course, an AI: ChatGPT in advanced voice mode. We talk about: * Our journey since selling Chartable to Spotify in 2022: life inside Spotify, and Harish’s explorations outside corporate life in construction and factory tech * Starting to work together again last July * Exploring projects: a Chartable-like analytics platform for audiobooks, a text-to-speech bookmarking tool called Earmark, and finally experiments with voice AI * We...

Feb 24, 2025•48 min•Season 1Ep. 1

Smart Speakers coming Monday Feb 24th!

Smart Speakers—the podcast about voice AI—is launching on Monday, February 24th! Subscribe now at https://smartspeakers.fm This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.smartspeakers.fm

Feb 05, 2025•43 sec

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