Cracking the real world ‘cocktail party problem’ in voice AI with Ken Sutton and Hamid Nawab, Yobe

Picture of Kane Simms
Kane Simms

More ways to listen and watch

About this episode

Ken Sutton and Hamid Nawab, co-founders of Yobe, join us to discuss what the meaning of ‘cocktail party problem’ is and how to crack it in with voice AI.

Ever wondered why you in-car voice assistant never hears what you say? Ever caught yourself shouting into your headphones on a busy road, trying to wake up your assistant? One of the most challenging parts of voice AI is picking out voices in noisy environments.

You can retrain speech recognition models using acoustic modelling and invest in beamforming microphones, but that might not be enough. Today, we meet the company that has cracked voice recognition in extremely noisy environments.

Yobe co-founder and CEO, Ken Sutton, and Hamid Nawab, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, joins us to share more on how he and his team have cracked the ‘cocktail party problem’.

In this episode

00:00 Introduction and presenting VUX World @ VOICE22 Presented by Kore AI
Find out more at https://voicesummit.ai/agenda and save 20% on tickets with the code VUX20
03:29 The journey to Yobe
09:00 What is the cocktail party problem in AI?
19:18 Product market fit for inferential AI
25:15 What is it that Yobe does
30:00 How to process an audio signal without frequency manipulation
37:12 Using two microphones
42:35 The ideal clients
49:40 Intelligence in AI
58:00 Outro

Visit https://yobeinc.com

Up your CX maturity in this free workshop with yours truly and Cognigy. Find out more: https://vux.ai/cognigy

Find out more about VUX @ VOICE22 presented by Kore AI: www.voicesummit.ai and save 20% on tickets with the code VUX20

Share

Weekly newsletter

The latest in AI-powered customer experience. Make better strategic decisions with the help of our weekly newsletter.

Host

Kane Simms

A strategic AI advisor who, for the past decade, has helped business leaders and product owners transform customer experience using conversational and generative AI.

Share

✓   Link copied

Weekly newsletter

The latest in AI-powered customer experience. Make better strategic decisions with the help of our weekly newsletter.

Top articles and podcasts

Related content

Cobus Greyling: why intents, graphs and conversation design have come full circle
Cobus Greyling on where enterprise AI is really heading: data, security, forward-deployed engineers and conversation design.
From answers to actions: building better government AI
Pete Kowalczyk on knowledge graphs, goal detection and moving AI from answering questions to taking action.
What’s really breaking your AI agents?
Discover where conversational AI projects actually break: contradictory source data, manual process and weak testing.
How Simplyhealth scaled voice AI to resolve 30% of calls
Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simplyhealth, breaks down how they scaled voice AI to resolve almost a third of calls, and what it took to get there.