105: Using Voice AI for Customer Service, Sales, and Enterprise Growth with Shawn Zhang

**Shawn Zhang** (0:00)
If you look at these enterprise voice AI agents, it doesn't understand sarcasm very well. And that's because of how the technology is built.

**Chris Daigle** (0:07)
As far as where we were and where we are today, would you say that we've made it in voice?

**Shawn Zhang** (0:11)
I think we're just getting started. I think there's a lot of problems.
But I think voice is just the most intuitive medium of communication. So I definitely see that this is a space that will only get more and more hot.

**Chris Daigle** (0:23)
Voice AI is kind of crowded, but this enterprise grade voice AI that you guys are doing, it's kind of a different game.

**Shawn Zhang** (0:29)
Yeah, I would say so. There's a different way of how we position it. And when we think about truly enterprise grade, we really care about security, that's number one. And then also just when people think about latency, latency is very mission critical for all operations. And you can't have lower latency than what is on your device directly.

**Chris Daigle** (0:46)
So what makes a voice AI company real versus just maybe something that was well-marked?

**Shawn Zhang** (0:50)
I think this is where everything is getting very hyped. So I would care less about what are they saying in terms of their solutions page, what are their customer testimonials looking like, and is that an industry or use case that's very similar to my own? Then yes, I would be quite interested in that. I think the second thing to also look at is to look at doing POCs and pilots.

**Chris Daigle** (1:11)
Shawn Zhang is the CTO and technical co-founder of Sanas, an enterprise voice AI company. He is building real-time technology that makes speech clearer, reduces accent bias, and helps humans and AI communicate more naturally across the world. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech.
Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, chiefaiofficer.com has the answer. We'll give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day-to-day.
We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results.
We'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. If you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hey everybody, Chris Daigle here, your host for Using AI at Work. And today I'm recording from a hotel room in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, as we're on a 10-day road tour visiting clients and really helping companies with the adoption of AI in their organization. And one of the things that we don't cover a lot is because we haven't really like fully fleshed out the use cases for it, is exactly what we're going to be talking about today with our guest, Shawn Zhang. Shawn is the CTO and technical co-founder of an enterprise voice AI company called Sanas. Did I pronounce that correctly?

**Shawn Zhang** (3:03)
Yeah, you did.

**Chris Daigle** (3:04)
S-A-N-A-S. That's right.
Shawn's in the thick of it. He's in Palo Alto. So the insights that we're going to be getting from him today as far as the capabilities and applications and the future of voice AI are going to be unlike what you're finding on your average YouTube video. So Shawn, welcome to Using AI at Work.

**Shawn Zhang** (3:24)
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited for the conversation.

**Chris Daigle** (3:28)
Awesome. So I guess we'll jump right into it. I'm a strategist around AI. I'm the CEO of an AI training and deployment company. But I'm also very fingers on keyboards. I'm very geeky about this stuff, right? And I think anybody that's a generative AI enthusiast is probably having fun.
And I first got introduced to Voice AI. But I think it was a company called like Air.AI, maybe in 2023, mid-early 2023
Their demos were great. Execution, not so great. But I saw that the future could be pretty powerful if a company could introduce, not synthetic interaction, but what truly felt like authentic interaction via voice over the telephone, would be huge. Voice agents online, I think the veil is pierced. There's no suspension of disbelief there, right? But on the phone, if we had the ability to pull it off, it could be a real game changer for a lot of businesses that can't afford the investment of time, of resources to have people on the phone 24-7, or outbound sales or anything like that. So you guys have been at this for what, four years?