Scott Stephenson

Last Thursday was our first-ever #DeepgramSpeak, and I couldn't be more excited about the work the voice AI community is doing.

We dropped new releases and heard from customers building with voice in new ways — some of which would've been hard to imagine not that long ago.

Huge thanks to everyone who joined. Let’s keep it going.

Some AI problems show up in research. Others only appear when you start thinking about how to put the tech in front of thousands of customers. At Deepgram, we endeavor to push the frontier AND productize fast, all while balancing speed with safety. More with @jason, @mishindan1, @gsivulka, and me on @ThisWeeknAI. youtube.com/watch?v=FnVyEY…

I spent a few years working on dark matter detectors, including the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment. At the time, I definitely didn’t imagine that experience would eventually lead to a company building voice AI.

It’s exciting to see the latest result from LZ getting a new signal to chase, but the bigger thing is what work like this creates around it.

When you try to answer a really hard scientific question, you have to build new instruments, new simulations, and new ways to work with massive amounts of complex data. That work doesn’t just stay inside the original experiment. It creates capabilities that go in directions nobody expected.

That’s what happened with @DeepgramAI. We were working with waveform data in particle physics and trying to understand it. That led us to think differently about how machines could process complex signals at scale. We weren’t trying to build voice AI, but eventually that’s where the work took us.

That’s what I find cool about moments like this. The discovery matters, obviously, but so do all the things that become possible because people decided to go after a hard problem in the first place.

Congratulations to the LZ team, excited to see what comes next…

Voice AI is about to have a big moment.

Excited to get the people building it together at Speak ‘26 in SF.

The weird thing about speech is that the meaning of a sentence rarely lives in the sentence itself.

“Sure.”

That can mean absolutely, I’m annoyed, I don’t believe you, or please stop talking.

The words are identical. The context is what gives them meaning - and that context carries through the conversation.

If someone has been frustrated for five minutes, the next response shouldn’t suddenly sound upbeat. If you’ve just solved their problem, the voice should feel different.

Expressiveness is not a style setting.

Expressiveness should be a product of conversational context.