Deepgram's $130M Leap: AI Voice Revolution

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0:41Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. AI company Deepgram has just raised$130 million, giving it a new valuation of$1.3 billion. So this is a big number. It's a big deal. They are an AI voice company specifically focused on sales, marketing, and customer support.

1:19So definitely a huge industry that they're already disrupting in a big way. We're going to talk all about their company and their new raise. Before we do that, Jamie, why don't you tell them about our school community? Yeah, so every single week, Jamie and I record an exclusive bonus piece of content on school community. We're doing a whole series on how to start a software company if you're not a coder. I am not a coder, but for the last few years, I've been working in the software space, creating products. And my most recent product is AIbox.ai. You get the top 40 AI models in one place. You can chat with them.

1:52And you can also build AI tools. We have a whole marketplace where you can post your AI tools for other people to use. So that product and that project that I've done, I've spent over$600 ,000 and three years developing it. And today, I think you can build a lot of that for a couple hundred dollars using a tool like Lovable or Base44. Over on the school community, Jamie and I just recorded a, we're recording a new series that you can go get access to. It's$19 a month. It is how to build a software company. If you are not a developer, I've spent the last week building a product, which will soon be called podcaststudio.com.

2:30It is a full podcast distribution platform like Spotify for Creators or Acast or like all of these other ones that cost a whole bunch of money. I recreated the entire thing in a week for$200 of lovable credits. If you want to see how I did that and how you can build a software product too with payments, like literally every integration, fully functional software thing without knowing how to code, go check out the school community because this series is going to be insane. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Deepgram. This is a great company. And honestly, that is an insane amount of money, like a huge kudos to them,$130 million.

3:07Who hopped in on this round I thought was interesting. They had a bunch of their existing customers or existing investors. So basically, when you see a company like this raise more money, you know that and they're doing it from existing investors, you know that the investors believe in it and the company is going in a great direction. So I think they already had In-Q-Tel, Drona, Higer, Wing, Y Combinator. Those are all previous investors and all of them put more money in. So they've raised a total of$215 million. If you go over to their website, they're basically an AI voice company. They specifically help with voice agents and they have an API, which just means that like if you companies can tie in and use their product inside of their platform.

3:46I think this is huge. And I'll give you an example of where I've seen this specifically used on a website, if you have your own company or platform, where I'd recommend using a tool like this. I usually when I'm doing customer support, I like to think of myself as I want to talk to a human, right? Like, I think we all basically have the same feeling because we've all have bad experiences where you've called up customer support. And it's like, this is the customer support bot, tell me what you want. And you're like, all right, like, I need to like, cancel my credit card. And it's like, you would like to extend your credit, like, no, cancel the credit card.

4:18It's like, I cannot do like talk to a customer service representative. Like you just start screaming, talk to a customer service representative, because like the bot doesn't understand you. And then you talk to a person, you get your problem solved. Okay, we've all had that terrible experience. And so I think because of that, it's very easy to think that the AI models today are just a variation of that. I'm here to tell you, they are not they are amazing. And they can actually handle most of your customer support. I've had two experiences in the last at least two weeks, but maybe it's the last week that I basically was like, okay, we're in a completely different world.

4:51And this actually is very functional. And this is what Deepgram is winning from. So I'll give you those two experiences. I don't want to hear Jamie's thoughts on these monstrosities of AI. So the first one was I was on 11 labs, and I am on the $1 ,300 a month tier of 11 labs. How I got myself into that black hole, don't ask. It's a slippery slope. You start using credits and you soon I'm just like, you know, trying to figure out how I'm going to pay$1 ,300 every month for this thing. So, um, and there's like massive project that I'm doing. It's actually going to wrap up. So I've canceled and already proactively turned my account down to$5, but I needed to know, um, with 11 labs, I was like, okay, what happens if I turn it down and I don't use all my credits?

5:31Cause I had like 11 million tokens on my account. I'm like, if I don't use all my tokens, like, are they just going to evaporate? So my God, I got to talk to customer support before I like cancel. Otherwise I was like, I need to hire like like 20 virtual assistants just spent all day long, like finishing this project for me, right? It's gonna be a madhouse on that account. So I was like, where do I talk to the customer support? And there was like no button anywhere. I was like getting frustrated. And they had this little button was like, talk to us. And I'm like, what does this thing do? And I like clicked it.

5:58And it was like, hey, like, I'm 11 labs customer support, what can I help you with? And I'm like, no, like not an AI bot. Like, I'm like looking for the speak to a customer service representative. But I was like, okay, I'll just tell it what I've. So literally, I click the button, it pops up, says that I'm like, I'm on the$1 ,300 a month plan at the end of the month, are my credits going to roll over or are they going to expire? And it's like, it literally was so cool is it's tied into the, your account in the backend. It knows everything about you. So it's like, you are on the$1 ,300 a month plan.

6:23You had 11 million tokens. You've used 4 million tokens. You have this many tokens left at the end of the month, because you're on this plan, it looks like you've already downgraded your account to the$5 a month plan. And because of that, um, you have two months where your tokens will roll over for the next two months. You don't have to worry about them like getting canceled. Is there anything else I can help you with? And I'm like, actually, no, that was all of my questions. Very concisely, no waiting on hold, no listening to someone with an accent that was hard to understand. I was like, except I was like, close it out.

6:51So that was an absolutely amazing experience. Honestly, amazing. And this is exactly what Deepgram is capitalizing on. 11 Labs obviously is going to like use their own tool for their thing. But every other platform in the world can use Deepgram. 11 Limes is a good option too, but Deepgram is a great option with the API and it will do that. Tie into your, like use an AI model, which is probably like Gemini, Clot or OpenAI to like do the brains and the thinking. And then you have one of these voice models that will talk and just tell people and like you've replaced all of the frustration and difficulty of customer support, fails and a lot of marketing stuff.

7:29Yeah, that's, I mean, that's awesome. I think one of the keys here and probably what is separating Deepgram apart from others right now is the low latency. So one thing, because I've talked with some AI chatbots as well, one thing that really annoys me is if there is a waiting period, if you have to wait for it to figure out what you said and blah, blah, blah. And then the slowness makes it feel more frustrating and less human-like. Although if they do solve your problems, I'm willing to wait as opposed to waiting on hold for a tech support agent overseas. latencies um so but i the latency factor i think is what what is um driving this company's success and and again the api where you can plug it into your your software so um yeah i mean i i think right now with chat gpt the voice chat is is really great you can tell sometimes it's trying to think about what you said and it's giving you like a kind of a slop answer like yeah i can understand how that would be really frustrating blah blah blah blah and then it gives you your answers but it still just feels more natural so i think there's definitely a key to that um yeah so uh let's see here it says that um 300 million 300 millions of americans have um used voice ai is that correct i guess i believe that i mean so i think what it's referencing specifically is there's like 300 million americans that um do drive-thrus and it's saying like basically one of the big things that deep gram is focusing on is being like the voice of the drive through which do you remember the whole taco bell like thing that happened last year where someone ordered like 18 000 water cups because they didn't want to talk to the voice ai i do yeah so i think like i think a lot of people are like concerned because they're like oh no like taco bell did an experiment where an ai voice would take your order but then someone like hacked it and i think maybe whenever that happened that was like a a reason but like today with open ai and anthropic being as smart and even gemini being as smart as they are like i think you could just say if someone makes a ridiculous order tell them to clarify or that like you can't do it and i think you really could have the ai completely do all the order handling and like obviously someone's trying to hack it but like you could say i want to order 18 000 water cups to a human too and they'd be like sorry you're ridiculous you know what i mean yep so anyways i think like companies got a like a they were like oh see look the ai can't do it's like obviously it can do it just put a little, I put a little tag in to check everyone's order and see if there's an anomaly that seems ridiculous.

9:53And even if you're a restaurant like McDonald's or Taco Bell say, here are the last 10 ,000 orders people have made. Does this order, like, is there an anomaly in this order that is, you know, not seen in the last 10 ,000 orders? And it's like, if it says yes, then he's like flag, don't let them do it for whatever reason. If it's no, then just put the order through and let people buy their stuff, you know? Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, yeah, I think the, with the AI voice thing with the drive-thrus, I think it's gotten better even since I've noticed different restaurants using it. Like, like now I only get referred back to a human if like, it can't understand me if the wind's blowing or if the kids are screaming too loud.

10:32Have you went to drive-thrus or restaurants that use it? Taco Bell. Yeah. Taco Bell. I think ours still does. Unless there's like a, a big, if I can't understand you or something, then it'll kick you over to a human. But I think it works pretty well already. And I think, you know, if they're heading this up, I think it could be a huge, huge industry for them to dominate. And it's going to save companies a ton of money. OK, amazing. Apparently, Carl's Jr. just got acquired. And so some of their investors are looking at like rolling this out there, too. So, yeah, I think we should see this. Like, I think basically all fast food, it'll just make it easy and clear.

11:10And I mean, I think the biggest problem the fast food restaurants have is like the outdoor speakers are like so hard to understand. half the time, but they can solve that problem. Just go stick a nice Bose speaker outside and let people talk in HD quality to our AI overlords. I think that's a great way to order food. Like, I don't know. I know people will hate me, but like if an AI can do it and it can do it well, I say just get an AI to do it and get a human to do something different. There's all sorts of creative things in the world, interesting things. We don't have to be the robots that pick up boxes and break our backs or flip super hot oil.

11:47Just get robots and AI to do it all. But I know a lot of people don't like that theory. I'm like a big automation guy. And I think that there's unlimited things for people to do just to be creative and to go build interesting things they want to do. So yeah, this is amazing. We'll definitely keep you guys up to date. This is a huge raise of money for Deepgram. They're doing a great job here. It'll be interesting. I did hear of what was interesting is that they weren't actually even trying to do a round of funding, but just their company was growing so much. They had so many investors reaching out to them.

12:16They're like, okay, fine, we'll take more of your money, which I thought was hilarious. But this is a fast growing area, very lucrative. So they're doing a great job. All right, everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed it, make sure to go check out our AI Hustle school community, where I break down in detail how I'm building an entire SaaS platform as a non-developer. Jamie and I are going to do a whole series on this. So if you want to, if you have an app idea or a business idea or software, or even if you don't have an idea, but you just want to get an idea, like go join the school community.

12:47This will change your life and be an amazing way to learn how to build SaaS. In addition, there's like other 70 other videos talking about how we grow and scale our businesses with AI tools. So you can watch all of those as well. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you the next episode. You know what? It sucks to be bored, but when I get on my phone and play real casino games on spinquest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite slots. Live blackjack, live preps with a live dealer. New players,$30 coin packs are on sale for$10. Play spinquest.com and you'll never be bored again.

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