Kris Efland
VP of Engineering
Presentation Title:
From Speech to Action:
Building the Next Generation of Voice AI Agents
Presentation Summary:
Voice AI is taking us beyond transcription and text-to-speech to become the true interface for autonomous agents. This session explores the product and technical innovations required to turn speech into structured, actionable real-time intelligence. Kris Efland, VP of Engineering at Deepgram, will share lessons from deploying large-scale voice AI systems that combine ultra-low latency speech recognition, dynamic model adaptation, and conversational orchestration.
Attendees will gain a roadmap for building voice agents that can listen, understand, and act — bridging the gap between human conversation and AI-powered decision making.
About | Kris Efland
Kris is VP of Engineering at Deepgram, where he helps small, focused teams turn cutting-edge speech AI into practical tools for developers. Over the past two decades, he has shipped everything from consumer gadgets to global cloud services.
Before Deepgram, Kris led Amazon Personalize and the Geospatial AI/ML portfolio at AWS, where he launched satellite-imagery capabilities for Amazon SageMaker. Earlier, he headed both autonomous mapping and autonomous AI tooling at Lyft, and held senior engineering leadership roles at HERE and Nokia—with a few startup adventures along the way.
Kris cares most about building products customers actually use and growing engineers who love their craft.