
AI Minds #074 | Thibault Mardinli, Explorer at Voice AI Space

Thibault Mardinli, Explorer at Voice AI Space. Voice AI Space is beacon to master voice tech's wild seas. They guide developers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts to top tools, news, knowledge, and careers, empowering everyone in the vast voice AI ocean.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podcast addicts, Castbox. You can also watch this episode on YouTube.
In this episode of the AI Minds Podcast, Demetrios welcomes Thibault Mardinli, creator of Voice AI Space, to explore how voice AI is shaping education, healthcare, and beyond.
Thibault shares his journey from managing high-pressure events to building a “smart walkie-talkie” toolkit—an early project that sparked his passion for voice-enabled information access.
He explains how these experiences led to Voice AI Space, a platform uniting news, tutorials, job boards, and events for developers, VCs, and enthusiasts in the voice AI ecosystem.
The conversation dives into impactful use cases, from pocket-sized AI tutors for education to voice-driven medical triage that eases practitioner workloads and expands access in underserved areas.
Thibault also addresses the darker side of the technology—voice AI scams—and calls for industry-wide action to prevent abuse before stricter regulations slow innovation.
They discuss practical deployments such as restaurant phone-answering agents, showcasing how voice AI can solve real operational pain points for businesses and professionals.
The episode highlights Thibault’s vision of uniting the voice AI community through open resources, hands-on experimentation, and live meetups to accelerate responsible adoption worldwide.
Listeners will come away with insights into building ethical, high-impact voice AI solutions and why collaboration is key to the technology’s future.
Show Notes:
00:00 Startup Journey: Ideas and Innovations
05:59 Exploring Voice AI's Appeal
10:01 Access to Quick Medical Knowledge
11:08 AI Triage for Emergency Calls
17:13 Countering Scam with Information Tactics
18:29 Voice Agents Combat Spammer Calls
22:56 Organizing Voice AI Meetups
More Quotes from Thibault:
Demetrios:
Welcome back to the AI Minds Podcast is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built AI First. I'm your host, Demetrios. And this episode, like every episode, is brought to you by Deepgram. The number one Text to speech. Speech to text. And now Voice Agent API on the Internet today, trusted by some of the world's leading enterprises, startups, and conversational AI folks. Some you may have even heard of, like Spotify, Twilio and NASA. I'm joined by none other than the creator of Voice AI Space.
Demetrios:
How you doing today?
Thibault Mardinli:
I'm doing good. Thanks for having me.
Demetrios:
There is a suit behind you and that suit tells a story. Can you give it to us?
Thibault Mardinli:
Actually that's because of this suit that I came into the voice AI industry. I worked as an events manager for many years wearing a suit when I was serving people, pleasing people. And I quit my job three years ago thinking, I can build something that will make events manager life easier. I can build a smart WKI toolkit. I can literally add a layer of smartness in a tool that we use every day walkie talkie, human to human. I was like, why not human to human and human to machine for live translation, not taking information or retrieval. That's how I got into Voice AI lecture.
Thibault Mardinli:
And I'm doing my best to not get back into this suit by working hard on what I'm doing.
Demetrios:
So basically you keep it behind you and it's a reminder. I love that. Now jingling suit, you got out of the suit and you got into Voice AI. How did it go from I'm going to help a events manager life with, with tech to now you're a very predominant figure in the Voice AI space.
Thibault Mardinli:
It story is literally the story of I'm super happy. I fail and I try to be appeal again. Now literally we failed with this concept of smart walkie talkie. It's not that we failed, but we start super early when the latency was quite bad. The French was had a Canadian accent and probably also one stuff. I'm a bit victim of the shiny object syndrome. So like literally every time something was new, I was like, let's reach, let's do this. And that's why what I'm doing right now is perfect.
Thibault Mardinli:
I'm literally feeding myself with new stuff every day, monitoring the web like a baby, excited about everything new. I failed with this startup say to myself, don't cry on yourself. Share what you've learned. Build this stuff, starting with a product, saying to myself, no product is cool. But what if I had the news? And after the news I was, but what if I had all the knowledge tutorial and stuff? And after I was like if someone learn about the tech, the news, how to build, maybe he wanted to get himself a job. So I'm going to add a job board. And once the guy has a job, maybe he wants to attend events to network and meet peers.
Thibault Mardinli:
So let's have the events, job board, final job board, events board. I tend to have too much ideas. I was like now I know that I will have more ideas. So I should find a concept where I can dump all my stupid ideas, which I call the lab. And in the lab, I'm literally testing stuff. Like you can go and check, there's like usdk, you can test like different supplier in the same place. There's a few more stuff on the background that I'm trying to develop. Not that easy, but really funny.
Thibault Mardinli:
I would say.
Demetrios:
Well, we should maybe take a moment here to explain what exactly you built with Voice AI Space and how you. I understand how you came about building it, but what is it?
Thibault Mardinli:
I will say it's something that I wish I had when I started in this space. it's literally a website, the platform where if you're curious about learning or about finding a solution for your company, you can go and have everything in one place. I won't call it a central hub. I put the name Central Hub, but sometimes I feel that it's too pretentious. It's a place where a central place where you can go if you're in the need of information. let's say if you're a developer or vc, someone who is curious or whatever, you can see in one place what's happening. At least I'm trying to keep up.
Demetrios:
Exactly. I think that's probably the biggest value prop is that if you're working in the Voice AI space and you go there, you can see what the newest is, but you can also poke around on pieces of the, the space that you may not even know about. And it gives you a very robust understanding of the whole Voice AI space.
Thibault Mardinli:
You should, you pitch it better than me. Thanks, man.
Demetrios:
It's easier when you're looking at it from the outside and the other piece is like you said if you're a developer, you have certain toys that you can play with. If you're coming at it just from the angle of I want to learn more about voice AI and you're not necessarily a developer. You also have toys by way of news. If you're a vc, you can understand what is happening in the space and that I think is, is particularly attractive. Now we mentioned also that we wanted to talk about why Voice AI for you. I think you have a certain affinity towards voice and maybe we can go into that.
Thibault Mardinli:
It quite linked to the project I had in the past. when you do events, you need to access a large amount of data and you need specifically to allow your stuff with new to events to get access to information super fast. So that's the beauty of Voice AI. Anyone can with the simplest way to do voice, access information. And if you think about it, this works also in education. The beauty of voice AI I believe, and I keep bragging it all over, it's not spamming people, it's not like replacing people, it's actually giving access to universal knowledge. And that's the beauty of AI actually.
Thibault Mardinli:
But with voice you can bring something on top of this. It's literally like having a personal tutor in your pocket. But with the constraint of like not pretending to be a doctor, but also allowing people to access a kind of medical emergency line constantly, you can bring education and medicine at large scale globally. So I truly think it's an amazing use case for voice AI. And I also think that we may be soon in a world where robots will be all over. And I always say to myself, we won't communicate with robots tapping on their shoulder, we won't use mouse, we will need to speak. And voice is the best API.
Demetrios:
So there's a few use cases there that you mapped out that you've been seeing and that are particularly exciting. One is education with the tutor in your pocket. I really like that because it allows for anyone to have someone who is infinitely patient with your questions. And I on one hand absolutely love that because I've got a lot of questions and sometimes it takes me a little bit longer than the average bear to understand things. Uh, and so this is perfect for that. The other use case that you mentioned that you're excited about is the use case around healthcare and how have you seen it being used in the healthcare space that makes you really like get it or, or how have you seen it being used in the healthcare space that is particularly fascinating.
Thibault Mardinli:
There's few way to look at it. There's the way where you literally make a practitioner life easier. So nabla for there's tons of like recorder, when you go to the doctor it records automatically your voice transcript and bam. Everything is done. There's also like I've seen few platform I'm not gonna like say supplier's name but I've seen few platform where literally you can access a kind of doctor like for specialized practitioner.
Thibault Mardinli:
It's not about replacing once again it's about like providing super quick access to people to like not someone but something that know a lot and with train on a specific knowledge which is the medical knowledge. Well it's one of my favorite stuff because there's lots of well many parts of the world where like medicine is expensive, not accessible to all and some part where medicine is literally like not in existence but like hard to access. So making people who work in medicine life easier. It's super cool because they work hard and they deserve like to have the tools to chill out a bit if they can. And allowing someone in a let's say war country to use simply his mobile phone cost is a question to access. Like if you're in an emergency you can literally call an online. We'll pick up and give you the first step of emergency.
Thibault Mardinli:
Like you know this could be like literally amazing.
Demetrios:
That's a really cool use case that I hadn't thought of before to help lessen the burden of the on call emergency folks. If there are certain municipalities or cities that are just getting bombarded by emergency calls and some of these emergency calls need medical attention or those first steps, as you're saying that could be really useful. I'm a little bit weary that you're going to hand over like the most high use case to voice AI agent. But potentially what you can do is filter out the emergencies that aren't truly emergencies so that the real emergencies get escalated to humans.
Thibault Mardinli:
I think 911 of us experiments going on with this. Actually some companies are like testing this.
Demetrios:
Now the other thing that I was going to think about when you talk about we're not going to be interacting with robots by typing. One thing that I've noticed a ton, and maybe this is a cultural thing, is that a lot of people really want voice to be here and our interactions with our computers or our machines to be through voice. But there's a lot of Times that I'm in public spaces interacting with my computer and voice just doesn't make sense there unless I go into a little cubicle.
Thibault Mardinli:
It's one of the limitations of voice. how far can we Even in an office space, would you be able to speak to your laptop as if you're surrounded by 20 people? I've seen some solutions work. There's a French company in Toulouse who is developing a microphone that is so good at capturing the sound of your voice that even if you speak extremely quiet, the voice agent will be able to hear what you said. So that's like one way to tackle this issue of speaking in public.
Thibault Mardinli:
It's not black or white. It's like always in the middle. There are some use cases where voice is definitely the fastest way to go. And some others were typing will be needed. And I think the next big stuff could be like chip neural control and all this stuff, but we're not there yet to work.
Demetrios:
Now you also mentioned there are ways that voice AI is being abused and you do not like it. Can you go into some of that?
Thibault Mardinli:
Simply like most of us, I've been victim of this robot calling salesman trying to sell me in France. It's quite good at selling roof energy. So like I found solar panels. Thanks. So now, literally like two to three times a day I'm getting phone call, like, hello, I'm la la la. And then you're like, okay.
Demetrios:
And they don't identify themselves as voice agents?
Thibault Mardinli:
No they don't. And they pretend to be human. Like the guy who set them up actually makes them act as if they were human, which is totally stupid because you can tell where it become like. So first of all, it's annoying for us individual, but when well become, I believe like extremely bad. And there's some reports who are coming out. Fox News, I think did like an article today, saying, estimating the cost of scam in the US on this. It's shocking.
Thibault Mardinli:
Like lots of old people in particular are targeted man, come on. And this is definitely an extremely bad use case for the industry. I've seen few people online on LinkedIn, big name in the industry starting to brag about this. I think literally the entire ecosystem should come together and raise a voice against this because if we keep going this way, regulation is going to be harder and harder and harder and it's going to impact every single startup in the ecosystem. The big boys will be capable of coping with regulation, but small startup who are or whatever like going through a regulation which will be tough because of a bunch of idiots who are not responsible. It would be like complicated and even like it's not about just startups. It's like how can you scam around like someone with like, you know, like what kind of person are you to do this?
Demetrios:
It's hard because the incentives are there. So it's very hard to tell someone, hey, don't do this out of the good of your heart or out of this moral code that we have.
Thibault Mardinli:
It may be hard to say but it's not all about the money. I'm sorry if It's my personal belonging. Maybe some people don't care about this and they just care about the amount of money on their bank account.
Demetrios:
I agree with you. In no way, shape or form think that it is the way to go. I think the hard thing is that there's plenty of people that do and they don't agree with us.
Thibault Mardinli:
Right.
Demetrios:
And so then that incentive is there for them to make a quick buck and do it. I do like what you mentioned to me though before we hit record and you said whenever you get hit with one of those calls, you try to drag out the call as long as possible and you also sign up to figure out who is the person providing this voice agent to these folks because you want to see what the company is so you can almost like name and shame them.
Thibault Mardinli:
I've done it a few times. Once I was really close to get the name of the company. I nearly had someone like coming to install solar panel at my. Unfortunately I'm in a flat so I couldn't say to him like come because like he will probably have googled me and I was like no, I can have breath. But now my technique is just like you want to piss me off, let me burn your token first and let me try to go to the routes and simply explain to you that what you are doing is perfectly legal, that I've got your phone number, which is probably a fake phone number but I will try to get the name and report it. And specifically in France, but it's quite annoying. Not only in France, I guess they pretend to work for governmental organization so it's quite tricky. Like you're like not only spamming people, you're.
Thibault Mardinli:
It's like I Don't know the word in English but when you abuse someone identity it's extremely like bad. So I'm trying to spam the spammer anyway and you mentioned earlier that we should create like a kind of system where literally we have the bots we haven't bought and we for getting this call and making last as long as possible. That's a super good idea actually.
Demetrios:
I think the key there is you would have to have your voice agent be running on device so it doesn't cost you money to burn the others money. And so if there is a way that you can just forward it, forward whatever these like spammer calls to your voice agent and then the voice agent is prompted to take up as much time as possible with the other agent. I can just imagine the solar panel company getting a bill that is like what is going on? I thought we were using this AI to close deals, but really this AI just cost us tens of thousands of dollars in OpenAI credits or whatever they're using.
Thibault Mardinli:
And I can already see a website where you've got the funniest recording of an AI trying to sell an AI you don't want to be sold.
Demetrios:
That would be great. That would be a perfect one for voice AI space. Well, so you see a lot of stuff in this space. You're very versatile. What as you look forward are different things that you're excited about in the voice AI space.
Thibault Mardinli:
Personal tutor I mentioned it I think is very cool you mentioned edge on device. Once we get there it will be like poof. Like I believe transforms the industry and allow super large scale deployments because countries where the living wage is a bit low to afford like Voice AI will be able to jump on it. Edge education, medicine. There's few, I don't know like specifically this morning I've like added to the voice AI space like two, three companies from the YC who just launched. One of them was from, I can't recall the name that was helping restaurants to answer their phone.
Thibault Mardinli:
And it may sound not a gadget but it may sound like rookie. It's not a big deal, trust me. I worked myself in a restaurant on the side of events. There's nothing worse when you run a service and you're like super busy and you've got your phone ringing, the receptionist is emping as much as she can on the floor and you're like darling, you need to go to get the phone. And she's like, nah, I can't. And after the service, I literally need to go through voicemail, call people back, take notes of love. It may sound stupid, but like it's a perfect use case where voice is super handy for working people.
Thibault Mardinli:
Professional.
Demetrios:
It's pinpointed, but there is a strong pain there.
Thibault Mardinli:
Definitely pain for the customer also, because last time last weekend I went to the restaurant. I waited like probably 15 minutes on the phone.
Demetrios:
To make a reservation.
Thibault Mardinli:
To make a reservation. And it's quite common because people are busy they take the phone, bear with me. Once you go and they keep you waiting while they speak to someone else, which is normal, you can't blame them. But definitely there's ways to improve this.
Demetrios:
Wow, that's so cool. Are there any other ones that you've seen that are. That caught your attention?
Thibault Mardinli:
One stuff from you actually.
Demetrios:
Nice.
Thibault Mardinli:
It's like.
Demetrios:
Have you been playing around with it?
Thibault Mardinli:
Not as much as I want because I work super early in the morning. I tend to like keep all my coding stuff like extremely. I wake up at 4am over there, 4 or 5. So my girlfriend is sleeping, so I can't really speak to my laptop. I promise you. Instead of typing on cursor, I wish I can use this, but if I do it, I'll probably get killed.
Thibault Mardinli:
So I'd rather sterilize and use my fingers and use my voice and died.
Demetrios:
That's excellent, dude. Is there anything else that you want to hit on before we go? Anything that we didn't talk about?
Thibault Mardinli:
I'm planning as well as you may have got. I'm passionate about events and I'm trying to merge my two passion into one stuff, which is organizing some small meetups for people who offer in the voice AI space for voice AI industry to catch up. And the beauty of it is as I'm not myself a company, I can bring like people from like multiple companies together like to capture chat. And the industry is so big and the market's so huge that I believe that people in these industries should unit and not fight anyway. that's more or less my current obsession now is doing events, keep pushing stuff into the library of the website and organizing some cool levels.
Hosted by

Demetrios Brinkmann
Host, AI MindsDemetrios founded the largest community dealing with producitonizing AI and ML models.
In April 2020, he fell into leading the MLOps community (more than 75k ML practitioners come together to learn and share experiences), which aims to bring clarity around the operational side of Machine Learning and AI. Since diving into the ML/AI world, he has become fascinated by Voice AI agents and is exploring the technical challenges that come with creating them.