Building World's Fastest Text-to-Speech Model: Lessons from Smallest.ai | Inside the Engine Room

How fast can AI really talk back? For Smallest.ai, the answer is 45 milliseconds. In this episode, Akshat Mandloi, Co-founder, breaks down how they built one of the fastest and most efficient voice AI engines, proving that systems thinking, not scale, wins in the real world. He shares insights on continuous retraining, evolving architectures, and the hidden engineering layers that make Smallest AI a leader in real-time speech intelligence. Want to see how the future of AI sounds? Watch the conversation till the end. Chapters: 0:31 - Intro 0:37 - The secret sauce behind the world’s fastest TTS engine 1:43 - Different approach from the traditional auto-regressive model 2:41 - The process behind the parameters of efficiency and quality 4:00 - The one unique thing Smallest.ai is solving 4:57 - Lessons from calibrating the speech models 6:20 - Building different corpuses for different languages 7:29 - Solving the hallucination problems 9:33 - Mental model for building the initial team 12:17 - The most exciting part to take on 14:16 - Outro Follow SeedToScale on LinkedIn for more insights: linkedin.com/company/seedtoscale Follow Akshat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshat-2503/ #AWS #InsideTheEngineRoom #LLM #AI #Innovation #Scale #AIModels #Voice #Language