Parakeet

Voice AI Masterclass — Kwindla Hultman Kramer and swyx

May 6, 2025 · 20:51

Shawn Wang and Kwindla Hultman Kramer announce a voice AI masterclass course, diving into the landscape of models like Dia and Parakeet, production deployment challenges, and future trends such as speech-to-speech and real-time video. Kwindla explains that telephony (Twilio) drives 99% of current monetizable voice AI, while open source frameworks like Pipecat enable low-latency multi-modal apps. The course covers turn detection, context management, and evals, with 28 sessions featuring partners like OpenAI, Google, and NVIDIA. The goal is to jumpstart builders from prototype to production, with real-time video expected to hit its inflection point by year-end.

Making Transformers Sing - with Mikey Shulman of Suno

Mar 14, 2024 · 58:58

In this episode of Latent Space, hosts Alessio and Shawn Wang interview Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, about making transformers sing. Suno uses transformers to predict audio tokens end-to-end, avoiding baked-in musical knowledge, with a tokenization secret sauce that also includes non-music audio for better vocal realism. Their models are relatively small (far below 175B parameters) due to latency needs, and they prioritize scaling research over brute-force size. Over half of Suno users employ expert mode, tweaking lyrics and style prompts, rather than easy mode. Shulman argues Suno is not the 'Midjourney of music' because music is inherently social and synchronous, unlike images. He demoed live generation, showing control via tokens like [beat drop] and style modifiers, and revealed future plans for collaborative concerts, continuous DJ modes, and personalized models. He also advocates for hiring economists to avoid Goodhart's law pitfalls in ML benchmarks, especially in audio where aesthetics matter most.