Otto Soderlund, CEO and co-founder of Speechly, discusses what’s hard about adding conversational AI to apps

Otto Soderlund co-founded Speechly in 2016 with Hannes Heikinheimo in their hometown of Helsinki. He believes voice should be a first-class citizen for all apps and making it easy for developers to add voice support from any platform will unlock new innovation.

Speechly is a member of the YC Winter 22 batch. Otto and I recently co-presented at the VOICE22 event in Washington DC although I presented remote so this is the first time we’re actually meeting. I heard good things about his talk so I was eager for this discussion. It didn't disappoint.

Listen and learn…

1. Why voice is the new app and what it means to develop "voice-first" apps
2. How RAIN Agency uses Speechly to help auto technicians use voice assistants to fix cars
3.  How to accurately detect and transcribe speech when dealing with common challenges like background noise and accents
4. When speech detection achieved "superhuman" levels of accuracy
5. How Speechly combines speech recognition with natural language understanding (NLU) on the local device
6. How Otto thinks about exercising responsible AI
7. Why "voice technology won't exist as a separate field in a decade"

References in this episode…

• Responsible AI has a burnout problem
• Alex Capecelatro from Josh.ai on AI and the Future of Work
• Krish Ramineni from Fireflies on AI and the Future of Work
• The Speechly demo site