Meet Alex Bordanova, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Voicemod, who joined the BotCast #2 to answer our usual questions on building with Voice AI.
Who are you?
I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Voicemod, and we are building real-time voice transformation for our users that are usually gamers, but we are building more and more cases for other uses as, for instance, identity cases. People that want to turn their voice to something else, and they don't want to match their identity online, for instance, or a journalistic approach.
How did you end up using voice AI?
I'm an audio guy myself. I've been related to audio since a long time ago, starting as a musician in my early beginnings. Then, I turned into the industry doing VST plugins, so I ended up running the products myself with a team of developers, and that brought me into higher and higher industry. When I ended up in Voicemod, that was as 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 voice. That was 2024, and we had a huge spike. And when it comes to pain, it is essentially the road that we open with that, because every single release comes with a self-assessment, a lot of metrics analysis about performance, about naturalness of the voice, intelligibility, and all the artifacts that the AI synthesis provide.
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 track, get insights, and then iterate again.
Where do you see the industry in 12 months and in 5 years?
I think that we're going finally to beat this naturalness guardrail. We will have finally top natural voices running in low latency, as high latency is already set. That's going to be a thing, and you need to be worrying already about who is speaking to you on the other end, because you need to find a secure way to speak with your friends and relatives. When it comes to five years, I think that we are speaking about another dimension completely. Voice AI probably is a commodity already 100%, and we are speaking about other problems. It's not only about changing your voice to sound like someone else, we are speaking more about cosmetics. You can tune your voice to make it sound deeper, brighter, or more anime, for instance, or more like a podcaster with a deep voice. Also, interoperability, so you can bring that everywhere. For instance, in this meeting, we would be transforming the voice, and then I would go into a Teams meeting or a Google Meet, and it will also work in the same way. Just think about porting that identity everywhere. That would be, in my opinion, one thing that we could see in five years.
