Founder Spotlight
Alex Bordanova
Chief Product and Technology Officer
Voicemod
Alex Bordanova, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Voicemod, describes himself simply as an “audio guy.” He started with music, moved into VST plugins and product development, and eventually found himself leading product and technology at one of the best-known companies in real-time voice transformation.
In this conversation, Alex talks about what brought him into Voice AI, what building and releasing AI voices has taught him, and why the future of voice might be less about sounding like someone else and more about choosing how you want to sound.
Who are you?
Alex Bordanova, I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Voicemod, and we are building real-time voice transformation for our users, who are usually gamers, but we are building more and more cases for other users, as for instance, identity cases, people that want to turn their voice to something else, and people who want to match their identity online, for instance, or journalistic approaches.
How did you end up using voice AI?
I'm an audio guy myself. I've been like related to audio for a long time, like musician early beginnings, and then I turned into the industry doing VST plugins.
I ended up running the products myself with a team of developers, and that brought me into higher and higher industries. When I ended up at Voicemod, that was the director of audio experiences, and then from that point, I went into the C-level, running the whole product and technology areas.
A moment of joy and pain using voice tech.
As a product person myself, there's nothing better than business kicking hard, right? And that happened when we released the narrator's voice. That was 2024, and we had a huge spike.
And when it comes to pain is essentially the road that we opened with that because every single release comes with a self-assessment, a lot of metrics analysis about performance, about the naturalness of the voice, intelligibility, and all the artifacts that AI synthesis provides, right?
What lesson would you share with other builders?
Ask the users. Listen to what they say. Their feedback is the most valuable thing ever to build on top.
With that, you need to abstract, get insights, and then iterate again.
Where do you see the industry in 12 months and in 5 years?
Let's play this game. I think that we're finally going to beat this natural car rail. We will finally have top natural voices running in low latency. Like high latency is already set. That's going to be a thing and you need to be worrying already about who you're speaking to on the other end.
So, that's another tip for the listeners of podcast cuz they need to find a secure way to speak out with their friends and relatives. When it comes to 5 years, I think that we're speaking about other dimension completely. Voice AI probably is commodity already 100% and we're speaking about other problems and it's not only about changing your voice to sound like someone else.
We're speaking more about what we were mentioning before about cosmetics, right? Like you can tune your voice out of your voice to make it sound more deeper, more brighter, or more anime for instance, or more like a podcaster with the voice.
Also, interoperability so you can bring that everywhere. So, for instance, in this meeting, we would be like transforming the voice and then I would go into Teams meeting or Google Meet and it will also work in the same way. But just think about porting that identity everywhere.
That would be my opinion one thing that we could see in 5 years.
