ai-voice
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Mati Staniszewski and the voice he could not bear to hear
A flat Polish film voiceover stayed with Mati Staniszewski long after school. With his oldest friend, he turned that irritation into ElevenLabs, then followed the question much further: what should a machine sound like when it talks back?
Piotr Dabkowski Wanted the Actors to Speak Polish
A childhood irritation with flat Polish film voiceovers became a technical problem Piotr Dabkowski could not leave alone. The ElevenLabs cofounder now leads the research behind voices designed to carry feeling across languages.
Ryan Brown Is Building a Computer You Can Talk To
After years building devices for virtual worlds, the former Oculus and Meta engineer is helping Sesame put a conversational computer into everyday life. The voice came first. The glasses are still to come.
Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is the founder and CEO of Speechify, the text-to-speech app that reads anything aloud in natural AI voices and now serves over 56 million users in 200+ languages. Diagnosed with dyslexia in third grade, he taught himself English by replaying a Harry Potter audiobook 22 times, then built the software he wished he'd had to keep up with the reading load at Brown University. What began as a personal hack for one dyslexic student became a Forbes 30 Under 30 company and an Apple Design Award winner.
Daniel Yousefian
Daniel Yousefian is a co-founder of Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking platform that captured the world's attention during the pandemic. Built under Alpha Exploration Co. and backed by $112M from Andreessen Horowitz, Clubhouse pioneered drop-in audio rooms before boldly pivoting toward intimate friend-to-friend voice messaging - complete with AI-powered custom voice cloning. Based in Yerevan, Armenia, Yousefian is part of the founding trio alongside CEO Paul Davison and co-founder Rohan Seth.
Harman Narula
Harman Singh Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Canary Technologies, the hospitality industry's leading AI-powered guest management platform trusted by 20,000+ hotels across 100+ countries. A Cornell Hotel School and Wharton MBA graduate, Narula co-founded Canary in 2017 alongside childhood friend SJ Sawhney, tackling the hotel industry's notoriously outdated technology infrastructure one paper form at a time. What started as a solution to clunky credit card authorization forms has grown into a $600 million company backed by Y Combinator, Insight Partners, and Brighton Park Capital, with $175 million raised in total funding including an $80 million Series D in June 2025.