Say, Pi at CHAI Meetup Dublin - Giving AI a Voice
Ross Cadogan
3/19/2024
Giving AI a Voice: Say, Pi at CHAI Meetup Dublin
This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of presenting at the CHAI (Chatbots & AI) meetup in Dublin, hosted at t-cube and sponsored by nine-dots. Around 50 AI enthusiasts gathered to explore the future of voice interfaces - from software engineers to industry professionals deeply engaged in Dublin's vibrant AI ecosystem.
My talk, "Giving AI a Voice: From Problem to Product with Say, Pi," walked through our journey of transforming text-based AI assistants into natural voice-first experiences. The presentation covered our core technical challenges:
- Building state-of-the-art speech recognition with Whisper
- Creating natural conversation flows with effective turn management
- Delivering high-quality multilingual voice synthesis
- Making voice interactions feel human, not robotic
What stood out was the audience's genuine engagement with these challenges. The Q&A session was particularly energetic, with discussions continuing well into the evening at a nearby pub. Many attendees immediately grasped the transformative potential of voice AI for accessibility, productivity, and creating more natural human-AI interactions.
Several people highlighted how Say, Pi's approach could benefit smaller enterprises that can't build these capabilities in-house - exactly the problem we set out to solve.
The tech community's response reinforces what we already know: voice AI is still in its early days, with fundamental questions waiting to be answered and endless opportunities to innovate. Everything is changing rapidly, making it an incredibly exciting time to build in this space.
Special thanks to David Curran for organizing this thoughtful forum and to everyone who attended, asked questions, and shared their perspectives. Looking forward to many more conversations—and innovations—in the voice AI space!