Taylan Kamis was inspired by the movie Her to pursue AI technologies that could make synthetic characters and voices more lifelike. After several years with Microsoft, including time on the media and applications team and serving as a CFO for some venture-stage startups, Kamis co-founded DeepZen in 2017.

The first problem the DeepZen team sought to address was one of the harder ones in the industry: creating synthetic voices that were high enough quality to be used as narrators for audiobooks. A key element of this problem is the length of the content. The synthetic voice or voices must be pleasing enough to be suitable for long passages and hours of listening at a time. Another important element is the emotive quality of the synthetic voices. 

DeepZen today provides audiobook production services and enables voice actors to create custom voices and monetize them without having to be in the studio for every project. We talk at length about the audiobook solution and how it works. That is followed by a discussion around new applications that are taking DeepZen into even larger markets.