In 2015 Dylan Fox was a machine learning engineer at Cisco. Amazon Alexa had just launched earlier that year, and it was taking the world by storm, creating a significant demand for companies to add voice controls to their products; Cisco was one such company.
That meant Dylan had to get familiar with the various voice recognition software solutions in the market. Much to his frustration, they all had poor developer experiences. He knew there was an opportunity for advanced speech technology. Soon after that, AssemblyAI was born.
“People didn’t believe it was possible. What they missed was that the technology was turning over. The incumbents at the time built their companies up on old tech, then stopped innovating. That left them ripe for disruption.” – Dylan Fox
Today, enterprises like WSJ, NBC Universal, and Spotify use AssemblyAI’s API to access state-of-the-art AI models to transcribe and understand speech and build AI-powered features faster. In this episode of “Spotlight On: AI,” Dylan discusses the profound changes to both his product, and the AI landscape, over the past eight years, gives insight into where he thinks AI is going as a category, and offers advice on how founders should approach problem identification, customer interaction and more. Highlights:
- 00:00 - Intro
- 06:15 - AssemblyAI's origin story and Dylan's journey as a solo founder; being accepted to YCombinator after the deadline
- 08:10 - Advice for founders around hiring and early product improvements
- 19:26 - Advice for founders during the AI development process
- 29:40 - The radical change that has happened across the AI landscape since AssemblyAI started, from Amazon Alexa to the explosion of Generative AI
- 27:34 - Best practices for cutting through the noise as an AI-native company
- 35:45 - Predictions about the future of AI
Explore more episodes from the season:
- Episode 02: Roblox’s Daniel Sturman on Building Great Teams in the AI Era
- Episode 03: Ada’s Mike Murchison on how AI is revolutionizing customer service
- Episode 04: Merge’s Shensi Ding on powering the next generation of AI SaaS companies
- Episode 05: Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang on the most powerful technological advancement of our time
- Episode 06: Bard’s Jack Krawczyk on the birth of Google’s AI chatbot and the creative potential that lies ahead
- Episode 07: Synthesia’s Victor Riparbelli on creating an environment to harness AI benefits and reduce harms
- Episode 08: Ironcald's Cai GoGwilt on a decade of anticipating the transformative power of AI
- Episode 09: Checkr’s Daniel Yanisse on tackling bias in people and AI
- Episode 10: Cinder’s Glen Wise on trust and safety threats and holding AI accountable
- Episode 11: Transcend’s Kate Parker on putting data back into the hands of users in an AI-driven world
- Episode 12: Arm’s Rene Haas on building the brain of artificial intelligence
