Meet Thomas Kluiters, Co-founder and Head of AI at Reson8, who joined the BotCast #5 to answer our usual questions on building with Voice AI.
Who are you?
I'm Thomas Kluiters. I am the co-founder and Head of AI at RESON8 Labs. We build customizable speech models primarily focusing on speech-to-text. Currently, we are one of the leading speech-to-text providers for the European languages, both for batch processing and turn-based speech models.
How did you end up using voice AI?
Three years ago, my girlfriend, who is a doctor, complained a lot about having to type a lot on her keyboard during her consultations with patients. She just asked me, "Why don't you solve this?" So, I founded a company called Juvely. We used existing speech-to-text models to transcribe the conversations between patients and doctors. But we realized that the accuracy of a lot of speech-to-text providers just wasn't good enough for the Dutch medical consultations. So, we started building our own speech models. I realized that the way we're building these speech models is really working and the way we can customize them is pretty scalable. So, why don't we just do this for the rest of the world? And so, I started RESON8 Labs, solving exactly this.
A moment of joy and pain using voice tech.
I think both the joy and the pain have a common denominator, namely getting models to a really good point. I would spend an excruciating amount of time on getting our models better, only for them to do worse in benchmarks. At the same time, the most wonderful thing there is, is sitting on top of benchmarks, both internally and externally, and your customers being really excited about your new model coming out, where you're actually solving specific problems, maybe rare names or medication names. At the same time, whenever you are working weeks on end trying to find a strategy that works and it's been for nothing, spending so much money on compute, it is the worst feeling in the world.
What lesson would you share with other builders?
I think it's definitely being a bit more ambitious. Whenever I speak to first-time founders, generally, they just are too afraid or too scared to think bigger. Especially in Europe, we tend to keep things to ourselves and try to minimize risk. I think we should be risk-takers. We should be ambitious. My primary advice here is, think about what you want to achieve and multiply that by maybe a thousand and really aim for and reach for the stars. Don't just think about the country you're working in, think about the continent you're working in, think about the world, not just where you are right now. Truly try to reach for the stars.
Where do you see the industry in 12 months and in 5 years?
I think the next 12 months are going to be very important to see just how well speech-to-speech models are going to be adopted in production. Still, I think there's a large amount of people who think that speech-to-speech is going to be the winning architecture of choice, whereas there's a lot of people as well, me included, that think that speech-to-text, text-to-text, text-to-speech are going to be the better way forward. We are very curious to see what's going to happen in the next 12 months. And for five years from now, I think voice is going to be the default interface to whatever we have. I think we're going to use our keyboards less, we're going to use our touchscreens less, we're going to be using a lot of voice. I think it's going to be a bit more normal to be speaking with our devices. So, I think Voice AI will be everywhere within five years, maybe even three years, who knows?
