Deepgram Targets Air-Gapped Laptops for Native Voice AI
Deepgram aims to run voice AI natively on air-gapped laptops while expanding model infrastructure, an executive said.
Voice AI is becoming core infrastructure as people replace screens and clicks with conversations with their devices, SiliconANGLE reported. That shift increases pressure on the compute, storage and partnerships behind the models that listen and talk.
Deepgram expanded its Flux model to 10 languages earlier this year. Mann said the company has 45 researchers who can explore and find new capabilities. "You know what they like to eat? Compute. Just tons of compute, tons of data," he said.
Mann spoke with theCUBE Research's John Furrier at the Dell event in an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. The discussion covered voice AI infrastructure, how Deepgram keeps improving its models, and the push to run voice AI on personal devices.
Deepgram has spent 13 years in the market and has tuned models for noisy settings such as air traffic control and emergency medical services, Mann said. The company assumes any model it ships will soon be surpassed and treats each release as a candidate for retraining. "Let's say it was trained 10 times to get as good as it was when we released it," Mann said. "What's stopping us from retraining it on better data?"
Those models also run outside Deepgram's own cloud. A large percentage of customers host the models themselves, and a recent partnership with Fortanix Inc. brings private, on-premises voice AI to regulated industries, according to Mann. Dell Technologies Inc. supplies Deepgram's infrastructure and runs its models in Dell's Customer Solution Center Innovation Lab.
Mann said Dell's customer base ranges from large to small enterprises. He noted that deployments reach from a small business handling interactive voice response on a compact Nvidia Corp. GB10 system to far larger installations.
The larger issue Mann is chasing sits outside the data center: AI-enabled laptops that students now carry to school. "I want our models on those, on the hardware, to run natively," he said. "Air-gapped. That's where we want to get to. That's where AI as a whole needs to start meeting people where they are and how they're going to use it."
TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell's AI Leadership Symposium. Neither Dell, the sponsor of theCUBE's event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE, according to the disclosure.