Taylan Kamis CEO of DeepZen on Synthetic Voices for Audiobooks and New Applications - Voicebot Podcast Ep 292

Taylan Kamis was inspired by the movie Her to pursue AI
technologies that could make synthetic characters and voices more
lifelike. After several years with Microsoft, including time on
the media and applications team and serving as a CFO for some
venture-stage startups, Kamis co-founded DeepZen in 2017.


The first problem the DeepZen team sought to address was one of
the harder ones in the industry: creating synthetic voices that
were high enough quality to be used as narrators for audiobooks.
A key element of this problem is the length of the content. The
synthetic voice or voices must be pleasing enough to be suitable
for long passages and hours of listening at a time. Another
important element is the emotive quality of the synthetic
voices. 


DeepZen today provides audiobook production services and enables
voice actors to create custom voices and monetize them without
having to be in the studio for every project. We talk at length
about the audiobook solution and how it works. That is followed
by a discussion around new applications that are taking DeepZen
into even larger markets.