Cartesia

We're excited to welcome Ronald Yu to our research team 🚀 Ronald was previously a research engineer at Meta, where he worked on various applied Machine Learning projects such as the Quest 3 controller tracking and the personalized VR Codec Avatars. Before that, his research background was in generative modeling, 3D data, and human understanding. "SSMs are among the most elegant technologies I have encountered in my career, and I'm excited to work with the leading SSM experts at Cartesia to deliver the world's best multimodal models," he said of joining the team.

Welcome to Eric Deng, our first product manager! 🎉 Eric was most recently a product lead at Cruise where his teams worked on testing, evaluation, and data science. Prior to that he worked on Waymo’s expansion into San Francisco, autonomy at Uber ATG, and robotics at Facebook. He clearly likes building robots and AI that interact with people. “I'm thrilled to be part of Cartesia's mission to pioneer the future of AI by combining the best of engineering and research. I look forward to collaborating with the team to build cutting-edge products that will shape the world," he said of joining Cartesia.

We've spent the last few years pioneering state space models (SSMs). Here’s why we believe SSMs will play a critical role in AI's future by enabling real-time foundation models with long-term memory and low latency that can run on any device.

Excited to share how Cartesia is transforming healthcare communication with Hello Patient! Even as medical practices embrace digital transformation, patients still overwhelmingly prefer picking up the phone. After years of leading patient-facing products and rebuilding call center infrastructure at Carbon Health, Alex Cohen founded Hello Patient to revolutionize how medical practices handle patient communications. During Hello Patient's stealth phase, Alex saw the potential in Cartesia's technology. As he shares: "At Carbon Health, we were handling 30,000 calls per day, with support costs consuming a significant part of revenue. When we discovered Cartesia, I immediately saw the potential to build what we always wished we had - natural-sounding AI voice technology that could actually handle complex patient conversations." Using Cartesia's Sonic model, Hello Patient has built a purpose-built solution for clinically administrative workflows, delivering:  ↳ 90ms latency enabling truly natural dialogue  ↳ Ultra-realistic voices that maintain the practice's brand  ↳ Healthcare-specific features like medical pronunciation handling  ↳ HIPAA-compliant infrastructure for patient data  ↳ Seamless LiveKit integration for full-loop conversations The impact? Hello Patient is already helping practices eliminate training costs and staff turnover, improve conversion on inbound calls, and allow support teams to focus on high-value patient interactions. Thrilled to congratulate Hello Patient on emerging from stealth with $6.3M in funding from 8VC, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures! 🚀 Full story in the comments 👇

“How has multimodality shaped your core approach at Cartesia?” Our work on State Space Models is about creating universal building blocks for multimodality. While we're demonstrating capabilities across text, audio, and video (starting with Sonic), we see different modalities as unique implementation challenges rather than architectural drivers. Cartesia's core technology is modality-agnostic – fundamental components that can be efficiently adapted to any domain, with multimodal applications being just one expression of these universal building blocks. We’re excited to pursue this path and shape the future of voice AI to start.

We're hiring our first design engineer at Cartesia. ↳ Further our core products, and create new ones through design leadership. ↳ Design and implement intuitive interfaces that make frontier AI capabilities accessible. ↳ Contribute to and refine our design systems, elevate craft with Cartesia. tl;dr design new AI products on top of our state of the art models & imagine product for crazy new models we're building. Be around amazing people solving hard & interesting problems that will change the trajectory of AI.

October was a busy month for us - we got to host 2,000+ builders across three different hackathons  and gave away $20,000 in prizes for the most innovative ideas built on Sonic. 🚀 AGI House SF Realtime speech to speech hackathon  ↳ Aditya's Form Wizard Pro turned static web forms into dynamic voice conversations  ↳ Karthik's Story Narrator AI revolutionized children's storytelling  ↳ Hebe's SheBeTalking mastered diverse speaking styles and tones Daily’s Conversational Voice and Video AI Hackathon  ↳ Brian & David's Stella redefined personal shopping with voice  ↳ Team Foul-mouthed Robot Chef combined SO-ARM robotics with voice AI  ↳ Rami Mithalouni's VoiceUI enhanced conversations with real-time visuals Cal Hacks 11.0  ↳ SpeakEasy by Nikhil, Zayd Ali, Siddharth, and Smit revolutionized language learning  ↳ Tanmayi's Hamilton simulated senate hearings  ↳ Kevin' MafiAI reimagined social deduction games Huge thanks to our partners AGI House, Daily, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Vapi, Tavus, Coval (YC S24), Product Hunt, and CalHacks for making this possible! We’re excited to see what else the developer community builds with Sonic. Read the detailed breakdown - link in comments! 🚀

☀️ NEW Customer Spotlight: Hedra ☀️ We’re thrilled to power Hedra's latest launch! Their Character-2 model now lets you bring images to life with your own voice through their latest voice cloning feature powered by Cartesia. From still images to speaking characters - see how Hedra is shaping the future of creative storytelling. Capture your voice in seconds to bring your Hedra characters alive. We're thankful to get to work with Michael on bringing creative ideas to life.

We're excited to welcome Zhaoyu Lou to our technical staff! Joe graduated in 2020 from Stanford where he worked with Dr. Andrew Ng on diagnostic radiology imaging (linked below) and Dr. Jure Leskovec on graph neural networks for subgraph isomorphisms. Post-graduation, Joe worked on algorithmic fairness and differential privacy at Meta and at Ello, a startup applying AI to childhood literacy solutions. Between roles, he spent seven months solo traveling around the world, gaining unique global perspectives along the way. "I'm excited to work on intellectually engaging problems with a brilliant and kind group of people with an established track record of groundbreaking research," he said of joining Cartesia.

Cerebrium built a demo that lets you practice everything from handling angry customers to preparing for YC interviews – with AI voices that respond as fast as humans do. Key capabilities powered by Cartesia:  ↳ Sub-100ms voice generation (fastest in the market) ↳ End-to-end responses in under 500ms ↳ Ultra-realistic voices (ranked the most human-like over every alternative by Artificial Analysis) ↳ Dynamic emotion & speed control ↳ Natural conversation handling Built in collaboration with:  Cerebrium - Serverless AI infrastructure  Tavus - AI avatars  Mistral AI - Language model Huge kudos to the incredible Cerebrium team for pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI voices! 🚀 Try the demo and read the full deep-dive - link in comments 👇