A decade in voice AI, from Otter.ai and Meta to his own AI Fund company. He also teaches DeepLearning.AI’s course on voice agents.
Session
Workshop
Date
Monday, November 30
Level
Intermediate
// AI Engineering Skill /
Building agentic systems
// 01 / Bio
Ashwyn Sharma is CEO and co-founder of Vocal Bridge, which he co-founded with Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. Vocal Bridge is a fully managed voice platform that gives enterprise AI agents a voice. Companies connect their existing agents and let customers and employees talk to them on web, mobile and phone, without building their own voice stack. In the three months since launch, developers at more than 90 organizations have used Vocal Bridge, including eight of the Fortune 500, and Andrew Ng featured it in The Batch.
Ashwyn brings a decade of voice AI experience, including ASR and TTS research at Otter.ai, speech recognition at Meta AI and building Einstein Voice AI at Salesforce. At healthtech unicorn Cadence, he led AI initiatives, published research on clinical NLP and earned multiple patents on LLMs for clinical applications. He is also the instructor of DeepLearning.AI’s course Voice for AI Agents and Applications.
// 02 / The session
agent.speak(): upgrade your chatbot to a voice agent in minutes
Abstract
Most developers have built a chatbot or text-based agent, but users increasingly expect to talk to software rather than type. Taking an agent from text to voice exposes problems text never had: multi-second reasoning delays become dead air, users interrupt mid-sentence and turn-taking breaks down.
In this hands-on workshop you’ll take an existing chatbot and turn it into a real-time voice agent without rewriting it. You’ll leave with a working voice agent and a practical playbook you can apply to your own agents the next day.
What you’ll learn
Beat latency: a fast agent talks while a slower one reasons
Handle interruptions and turn-taking
Add voice to an existing agent, then ship to web, mobile and phone
Test with simulated calls before real users do
// 03 / Courses
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