Raj Shivakumar, Summer Internship with Jambonz building vCon

This podcast makes me very proud of everyone involved in TADHack. In March this year we ran TADHack Open, Raj was part of the team that won the vCon (STROLID) prize.

Dave Horton, Jambonz, a previous TADHack sponsor, saw their work and realized the team could help him add vCon to Jambonz, and all Jambonz’s customers. Jambonz is an open source voice platform for conversational AI providers and CSPs, used by Cognigy and Kore, who’s customers include Fortune 50 companies. Jambonz is in the big leagues! And is bringing vCon to the big leagues!

As Dave clearly stated, TADHack is an excellent source of talent for open source projects, who come trained on the latest in programmable communications. He considers them his ‘secret sauce’.

Thomas Howe, the father of vCon, was also on the call to see his standard being used in the field.

Raj showed some of his work, using vCon to compare real-time and non-real-time transcription. Also analyzing turn by turn conversations to rate how each turn progresses the conversation. This reminded me of the work Symbl.ai is doing on scoring human and bot agents, I think there’s synergy there.

Also implemented was redaction of PII (Personal Identifiable Information) on the original recording to protect privacy. There’s also a discussion on the JSON schemas used. vCon is moving from standard into an active community building on each-other’s shoulders.

Jambonz is building use cases focused on the front-end of the voice AI process. Once its in the hands of Cognigy and Kore’s customers, we’ll see an explosion of applications through 2025.

Raj did several projects for Jambonz over the summer, and built out his SIP and VoIP skills. Raj will continue to be involved in Jambonz, open source projects always need contributions.

As a software student, contributing to open source projects is a great way to build a reputation, have a massive impact on an industry, and looks great on a resume. In fact, you may find it becomes your full-time business after graduation. Just make sure you graduate, if only for your parents.

Congratulations to Raj, Dave and Thomas in showing why TADHack matters!