Dylan Fox is the founder and CEO of AssemblyAI, the voice AI infrastructure platform behind AI notetakers, medical scribes, drive through ordering, contact centers and humanoid robots. AssemblyAI went through Y Combinator's first AI batch in 2017 and now serves over 1 million developers with roughly 100 million API calls a day.
We get into the volume numbers, why weekly conversations are up over 800% in three years, the three macro trends pulling voice into everything, why coding agents turned small businesses into API customers, how data mixture drives 75% of model quality, the humanoid robot speaker problem, on device models, and the disclosure question the entire voice agent industry is avoiding.
"It's very easy to optimize for a public open source benchmark. It's very hard to optimize across all these real world applications."
We cover
› 120 million weekly conversations and 4x YouTube's daily voice volume
› Coding agents expanding the TAM by 100x
› Context aware voice models and the McDonald's ordering problem
› Why humanoid robots can't disambiguate speakers
› Whether voice agents should disclose they are AI
Dylan Fox: https://x.com/YouveGotFox
Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea
Sourcery: https://x.com/sourceryy
𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊
YouTube: https://youtu.be/xAF7HkX2DXI
𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒
• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery
•MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai
•AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio. Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Dylan Fox, Founder & CEO at Assembly AI
(01:06) AssemblyAI's voice traffic just beat YouTube by 4x
(03:33) $100K in GPU credits that started it all
(06:39) Why Voice AI is inflecting right now
(10:11) AssemblyAI's infrastructure-first strategy
(12:41) Handling 120 million weekly calls
(14:49) How AI agents are rewriting Internal Ops at AssemblyAI
(17:05) The Sovereign AI problem nobody's solved for voice
(18:26) Is the Keyboard and Mouse finally dying?
(22:33) The problem Humanoid Robotics hasn't solved yet
(25:14) The real problem behind translating languages
(29:27) Can AI actually talk to animals?
(31:24) The real reason Open-Source benchmarks lie to you
(34:20) Building websites in chat rooms as a kid
(36:48) On-Device AI models are about to change everything
(43:03) The people who shaped Dylan's career
