Founder Spotlight

Today we're talking to John Kelvie, CEO and co-founder of Bespoken AI.

He's been in voice for almost fifteen years now. Started in speech recognition, moved into testing and monitoring when Alexa and Google Assistant blew up, and stuck around long enough to watch that whole cycle play out and land right back in voice AI.

He's helped over a hundred companies ship voice experiences that actually work. So we asked him what he's learned, what surprised him, and where he thinks this industry is headed in the next year, and the next five.

Who are you, and what are you building?

I'm John Kelvie, CEO and co-founder of Bespoken.ai . We help people build better voice experiences. For about 10 years we have provided testing, evaluation, and monitoring tools for voice AI and other AI systems, and by my count we have helped more than a hundred customers deliver exceptional voice experiences.

How did you end up in voice AI?

I started out working on speech recognition systems almost fifteen years ago, and I co-founded a startup in that space as CTO. Then I got interested in Alexa, Google Assistant, and the Amazon Echo when it came out. I thought these products were going to bring huge numbers of people into the ecosystem, that we would see millions of apps. So I built a company to help people test those systems and make sure they work well. We moved into IVR when Alexa and Google Assistant did not take off the way we expected, and now we have come to voice AI.

Your moment of joy and pain building with voice technology?

The joy is seeing our customers succeed. This technology is remarkable, and I have thought so for a long time. Watching customers do things they did not think were possible a year or five years ago is a real pleasure. The pain is how fast the market moves now. It is not only voice AI, it is everything in technology today. Keeping up is exciting, but it is also dizzying.

What lesson would you share with other builders?

Voice is tricky. A lot of people come into it from chatbots and assume it is straightforward, but nothing about voice is easy. You have to handle accents, languages, pauses, and disfluencies, and people who ramble. Beyond the technical challenges, people often reach for voice when other channels fail, because they are not available, or the app or website hit a wall, or they are driving. Those are harder scenarios. So my advice is to not underestimate the technology, and to deliver something beyond what people already get from a typical website.

Where do you see the voice AI industry in the next 12 months and the next five years?

In the next twelve months, I expect major adoption from Fortune 500 enterprises. There is adoption already, but real production deployments are happening now, and once that momentum builds I think it cascades across the enterprise and turns voice AI from something prospective into something real that drives value. That surprises me a little, I did not assume it would happen this fast.

In the next five years, here is my big prediction, and I am not the only one making it: enterprises get reconceived as agents plus databases. A voice bot that just does what your website or app already does is not enough. People need to re-architect, give agents more access, and let them solve problems they could not solve before. There is a lot of trust that still needs to build, but I think a lot happens in five years. Last thing: I am personally looking forward to the next version of Siri. I love Siri. I know people dog on it, but I think it has been good for a while, and I think it is going to be great.