Meet John Kelvie, CEO and co-founder at Bespoken AI, who joined the BotCast #4 to answer our usual questions on building with Voice AI.
Who are you?
I'm John Kelvie, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Bespoken.AI We help people build better voice experiences. We've been doing this for about 10 years, providing testing, evaluation, and monitoring tools for voice AI and other types of AI, and by my count, we've helped more than 100 customers deliver exceptional voice experiences.
How did you end up using voice AI?
I came into this space originally working with speech recognition systems. Then I got really interested in Alexa and Google Assistant when they came on the market. My insight was these developers are going to need better tools to build for these ecosystems, and from there, we basically evolved with the market, started working with the contact center, and now got into voice AI. We've seen the need remain just as strong, and the market has obviously gotten a lot more compelling and a lot more exciting.
A moment of joy and pain using voice tech.
The joy for me is definitely seeing our customers be successful with it. I think this technology is amazing. I've seen it as amazing for some time, and watching them do stuff that they did not think was possible a year or two ago or five years ago, I think is amazing.
The pain for me is definitely that I cannot believe how fast the market is moving now. It's not just with voice AI, it's everything with technology today with AI. So I will say keeping up with it is exciting, but it's also rather dizzying.
What lesson would you share with other builders?
The main thing I would share is that voice is tricky. We see a lot of people coming into this from chatbots or other spaces, and it seems like it's sort of straightforward. But there's nothing that's easy about dealing with voice. You have to deal with accents, you have to deal with languages, you have to deal with pauses and disfluencies, you have to deal with people that ramble on and on.
There are those technical challenges, but moreover, people are using voice as a channel a lot of times when other things won't work, either because they're not available or because they've hit a wall. The app doesn't work, the website doesn't do it, they're in a car. It's dealing with harder scenarios, so I would really encourage people, one, don't underestimate the technology, and also realize that you need to deliver something beyond just what people are getting from a typical website or app.
Where do you see the industry in 12 months and in 5 years?
In the next 12 months, I think we'll see major adoption from Fortune 500 enterprises. I mean, there already is adoption, but things really going into production. We're seeing that now. And once that momentum builds, I do think it's going to really cascade across all the enterprises, and it's going to take this from something that's prospective into something that's very real and is driving real value for a lot of people, which I think is amazing, and I really look forward to seeing that. That part I think is fantastic, and, frankly, sort of surprised me. I did not assume that would happen.
In the next five years, this is sort of my big prediction. I don't think I'm the only person making this, but I think you're going to see these enterprises reconceived as agents plus databases. It kind of goes to my previous point that you have to deliver more value. Just delivering a voice bot that does what your website or your app does is not enough. So, people need to re-architect things, they need to give the agents more access, and they need to enable it to solve problems that it wouldn't have otherwise been able to solve. And I think you're going to see people doing that in five years. Developers and product builders, we see that it's possible. There's a lot of trust that needs to come up, but in five years, I think a lot is going to happen, and I think that's fantastic.
And then the last thing I'll say is, I am personally really looking forward to the next version of Siri. I love Siri, think it's a great product. I know a lot of people dog on it, but I think it's been good for a while, and I think it's going to be amazing, so those are my predictions.
