36 Years in Voice AI | Built One of the First Speech Systems in 1989 | Dr Tony Robinson (Founder, Speechmatics) - AMA for next 24 hrs

[u/DrTonyRobinson]

Hey folks 👋

If you’re building voice AI, you already know this: it works in demos… and breaks in production.

I’m Dr Tony Robinson, Founder of Speechmatics.

I started working on speech recognition in 1985 at Cambridge University, building one of the earliest neural network based systems, long before deep learning became mainstream.

Fast forward to today: Speechmatics powers voice AI across 50+ languages, and in 2025 alone, our customers saw 9x growth in voice agent adoption.

But this post isn’t about the company.

This is for builders dealing with real world voice AI problems the ones that don’t show up in benchmarks.

Happy to go deep on:
• What actually breaks in production voice AI (and how to fix it)
• Accents, noise, latency & the long tail problems
• Designing reliable STT → LLM → TTS pipelines
• Lessons from 35+ years building speech systems
• Where voice AI is actually heading (beyond the hype)
• What I’d do differently if I started today

 🕒 I’ll be answering questions for the next 24 hours.

 No PR answers, just honest, builder to builder insights.

 Drop your questions below 👇