Frank Zhang, General Agent for Japan and Korea at Tripo3D, joins Derek Zheng in Tokyo to discuss how AI is changing 3D content creation.

They talk about why 3D generation is a much harder technical problem than image generation, how Tripo3D lets users create 3D models from text and images, and why lowering the barrier to creating 3D assets could open the door for more creators.

The conversation also explores AI-powered toys, user-generated content in games, and how Tripo3D and Agora can work together. Frank explains his view that Tripo3D gives creators the visual foundation while Agora adds voice and interaction, making digital characters that people can actually talk to.

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In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis sits down with Luka Chkhetiani from AssemblyAI to unpack what it takes to build reliable speech AI for real-world applications. Luka shares how AssemblyAI's mission evolved from making speech recognition accessible to developers into building robust models for real-time transcription, voice agents, conversational intelligence, and messy production environments.

The conversation explores why latency alone is the wrong obsession, how turn-to-turn responsiveness changes the user experience, why reliability is now one of the hardest problems in speech AI, and what developers often misunderstand when bringing voice agents into production.

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In this episode, host Hermes Frangoudis interviews Faraz Siddiqi, co-founder and CTO of Bluejay, about testing and monitoring voice AI agents. Faraz explains how Bluejay uses "digital humans" synthetic customers with accents, background noise, and even emotions to run hundreds of parallel simulations. What used to take 10–12 hours of manual calling to test 200 menu items now takes just five minutes, letting you grab coffee while Bluejay finds failures before real users hit them. He shares why latency over 1.5 seconds breaks trust, how a transcription error turned "Dr. Pham" into "Dr. Fan," and why founders should listen to every call manually before automating. A must-watch for anyone building production-grade voice agents.

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In this special montage episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, host Hermes Frangoudis brings together leading researchers and founders from across the speech‑to‑text space to unpack the voice pipeline from the ground up. The conversation covers how cascading architectures stack up against real‑time speech‑to‑speech systems, why Voice Activity Detection acts as the critical traffic controller, and how enterprises can eliminate model pathologies like hallucinations and omissions through modular “Lego block” integration. Guests from Deepgram, Agora, Soniox, and Rime share hard‑won lessons on achieving near‑native accuracy across 60 languages with self‑supervised learning, taming unpredictable pronunciations in LLM‑driven agents, and why truly human‑like emotional understanding is still around the corner. The episode confronts the persistent myth that speech recognition is a solved problem, spotlighting the long tail of accents, rare words, and noisy real‑world conditions that still break most systems, and makes the case that for regulated, high‑stakes industries the auditable text backbone of cascading pipelines remains essential even as speech‑to‑speech models race toward a more natural future.

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In this episode, host Rishi Ahluwalia interviews Ankur Edkie, CEO of Murf AI, about the hidden complexities of scaling enterprise voice AI. Ankur discusses the journey from pre-ChatGPT text-to-speech to building hyper-efficient, human-like voice systems. He unpacks why voice demos feel magical, but production deployments often fail, highlighting the critical gap between lab settings and the variability of real-world acoustics and devices. The conversation covers the challenges of the cascading stack (ASR, LLM, TTS), the importance of turn-taking and latency consistency over raw speed, and Murf’s "compute acquisition" approach with the Falcon architecture that drives down costs and enables global data residency. Ankur concludes with a hard lesson for builders: enterprises are buying holistic outcomes and trust, not just isolated API calls.

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In this episode, host Derek interviews Zeyi, Founder & CEO of WaveSpeedAI, about simplifying AI media generation. Zeyi explains how WaveSpeed provides a unified, high-concurrency API that lets developers easily switch between models like Flux and Wan without managing complex GPU infrastructure. He highlights unique offerings like the 10-minute lip-sync tool InfiniteTalk and video extending, discusses regional preferences in AI-generated faces, and shares cost-saving strategies like low-res generation with upscaling. The episode wraps with Zeyi's advice for AI builders: leverage AI coding tools, structure projects wisely, and use API platforms instead of optimizing models from scratch.

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In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, host Hermes interviews Ricardo Herreros Symons from Speechmatics to explore the evolving landscape of speech recognition and its role as the essential gateway to "LLM magic". The conversation delves into the technical hurdles that prevent speech from being a truly "solved" problem—such as background noise, diverse accents, and specialized terminology—and why Speechmatics prioritizes diarization as a critical requirement for security and accuracy in high-stakes industries like healthcare and finance.

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In this episode of the Convo AI podcast, host Derek Zheng has an in-person conversation in Japan with Yongle Yang, Solution Architect at Dify, to explore how their LLM Ops platform is streamlining AI application development through an intuitive workflow canvas and multi-agent orchestration. Yang details Dify’s "do it for yourself" philosophy and challenges developers to build AI that can "replace" their own roles, freeing them to pursue more creative professional side hustles.

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In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, host Derek Zhang sits down for an in-person conversation in Singapore with Dr. James Ong, founder of the Artificial Intelligence International Institute (AIII). With a career spanning 40 years in the AI sector, Dr. Ong shares his vision of "AI for Humanity"—from advocating for UN SDG Goal 18 to building practical governance frameworks. The discussion explores AI in FinTech, agentic oversight, avoiding speculative bubbles, public AI literacy, sovereignty AI, and Singapore’s leadership in AI safety hubs and testing.

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In this episode of the Convo AI World Podcast, Hermes Frangoudis interviews Klemen Simonic, founder and CEO of Soniox, who discusses how his team is achieving native speaker accuracy across 60+ languages. Klemen explains how Soniox leverages unsupervised learning and a universal model architecture to handle seamless language switching and real-time, mid-sentence translation with minimal latency. By prioritizing robustness and low-latency performance over traditional cascading models, Soniox enables high-fidelity voice interfaces for healthcare, wearables, and voice agents, while also breaking down significant accessibility barriers for the hearing-impaired community

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