Voice AI seems to be echoing louder by the day, emerging as a core business interface, but it still resonates feebly when it comes to conversations. When Akshat Mandloi and Sudarshan Kamath were intrigued by this rather silent zone, there were whispers of opportunity for their brainchild Smallest.ai. But, it was not the only one. A host of startups have been busy trying to resolve the perpetual challenges of latency, scale, accuracy, and deployment. Plugging the gaps has been the need of the hour as voice AI becomes the interface for India’s digital economy that’s likely to reach $1 Tn by 2030, making up a fifth of the country’s GDP. After being seasoned in building AI systems that run in production for close to a decade, Mandloi was miffed by the industry’s obsession with large models. “Why do we need such large models to solve everything? To solve very specific business use cases, you don’t need very large models,” he argued. Mapping The Silent Zones In Voice AI Friends since their days in college, Mandloi and Kamath wanted to build something of their own. The opportunity beckoned to them when they began closely tracking voice as a modality. Voice was… Read MoreInc42 Media
