The craft behind voice AI magic with Tom Shapland

This week, Tom Shapland shares his journey from agriculture tech to founding Canonical, a tool that helps voice AI developers understand and improve conversations by mapping call stages.

Tom has deep experience in the voice world—we loved this conversation and we’re sure you will too!

Links

https://canonical.chathttps://x.com/Tom_Shaplandhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-shapland-b4494212/

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

1:05 - Welcome and first AI moment

3:03 - Computer vision for thirsty plants

5:50 - Explaining AI to farmers

7:52 - Hardware is hard

8:31 - Non-VC shaped business struggles

16:51 - Starting a new company

19:41 - From metrics to conversation stages

22:42 - Voice AI evolution

26:40 - Balancing determinism and freedom

29:53 - Who uses Canonical and when

32:39 - Don't make your agent spell anything

35:52 - Zero to 80% is easy, production is hard

39:28 - Future of voice AI adoption

42:21 - Book recommendations and closing

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.smartspeakers.fm