SoundHound AI’s Innovations: Revolutionizing Voice Technology in Everyday Life

Welcome to FinTech TV.

Soundhound AI builds voice AI agents that let businesses automate natural multilingual conversations across industries.

The company just announced a partnership with Pete's Coffee and recently participated in Nvidia's GTC Mobile World Congress 2026 and CES, and 2026 could be the year of the AI agent as AI transforms from passive tools into action-oriented. agents that can complete tasks, transact, and also interact seamlessly across devices.

Now Nvidia CEO Jensen Pong also saying recently that we've already achieved AGI, pointing to the rapid growth of agentic AI.

Joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange is Michael Zagorik, COO of Soundhound AI.

Michael, great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Renan.

Well, you and I were talking about the evolution of SoundCloud AI.

So walk us through the latest innovations, especially since you're coming off a lot of these events.

Great, thank you.

Uh, SoundCloud AI at a core were a voice and conversational AI company.

It was founded in 2005 with the mission of bringing voice and conversational AI to the world.

Uh, in 2016, we announced our voice platforms.

So the last 10 years have really been a lot of innovation and moving forward in bringing voice to cars and devices, customer service into restaurants, and eventually into the world around us.

What we're seeing now is this agentic revolution.

Generative AI has transformed the landscape.

The conversational nature of what you can do with all these platforms means we've truly entered the conversational AI era.

It's really a question of how do you take that capability into products, into services, and how do you actually add value to the organizations who can actually take advantage of it.

Yeah, and building on what you just said, Mike, evolution and innovation are key words here.

So what does all of this mean for the everyday consumer?

Absolutely.

I mean, a lot of times, um, you can break it down into, say, the product space.

So we, in, in the vehicle, for example, there's been voice interaction in vehicles for years and years, but it was always very limited, very still good.

The ability to truly converse, um, and have access to all the capabilities of your car and around the world, your voice is there.

Um, for customer service, um, for years, consumers have been subjected to these, uh, IVR systems, presser say one and things like that.

So the world is now waking up to the possibility that you can actually have a conversation with AI and it will respond in natural ways, which means that the barriers for automation for these companies who want to use automated systems is coming down.

Customers are more willing to accept it because they're seeing the benefit there.

So it's product enhancement, it's customer service, it's voice transactions, and eventually what we're really pushing forward towards as voice commerce.

And speaking of vehicles, we might talk about energy and fuel powering vehicles, but what about the fuel that powers some human beings, including myself, because sometimes I feel like I run on coffee, but I understand that you announced a partnership with Keats, so tell us about that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, well, one of the, one of our most, um, proud, proudest investments is working with restaurants and food, uh, service capabilities.

So we Um, are in over 15,000 locations in the US.

So if you call, say, uh, you know, a Chipotle or a Casey's Pizza or a White Castle drive-through, our systems are able to take the order and process it.

Um, but we also know that, that, uh, helping restaurants and retail locations run more efficiently is central to their ability to scale.

Uh, in this case, with Pete's Coffee, we introduced a product called employee assist.

And this allows any Pete's employee, if they have questions or instructions, uh, they can have a conversation with the agent that we provided in store.

So this is an employee facing use case.

It's operational.

And, you know, there is a world where there's a lot of turnover or, or a manager may not be present.

So have instant access to nutritional information, instructions, uh, inventory management.

Uh, for these employees is, is a game changer for them.

So we're rolling out in all Pete's locations, and you're getting a lot of interest from, from this category.

And Mike, you and I are here on the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange, and Q12026 has been the birth of a term called SASpocalypse.

So when we're talking about agentic AI, do you think it is disrupting traditional software as well as SAS, and what trends are replacing?

Yeah.

Well, I think if you think about uh what traditional software has done is that you, they tend to build workflows or capabilities uh within an application interface.

And um the big disruption here is that a lot of these generated AI platforms can generate code and work, uh, workflows on the fly.

And so, I think that typically, as we've seen in the markets, that they can be very volatile during disruptive periods, which we're in now, and there's a lot of disruption in the world, both technically, geopolitically.

And so it's, um, I think it's too early to say that we're in any type of extreme situation.

The disruption is real, how big the disruption is and how companies can adapt.

How can they use a generative AI to improve their own systems?

A lot are adding co-pilots.

So you have a traditional interface that's been designed, uh, some sort of graphic user interface, but then at the same time, you can have a conversational agent that lives alongside of it.

So I think we're gonna see a lot of adaptation.

And innovation, um, in this space.

But the, the clear point here is, uh, AI and Agentic AI is here to stay, and every organization needs to adopt it in order to compete.

And when we're talking about the role of artificial intelligence, in particular agentic AI in highly regulated industries in sectors such as healthcare or financial services, how do you deploy it safely?

Absolutely.

I mean, the regulations are really important, whether it's HIPAA compliance for healthcare in particular, GDPR, for, for customer information, and even just the brand trust that um that you might have with a financial institution.

So, what um agentic AI allows you to do is have an open-ended conversational agent, right?

Um, and what people like about that is that it's unstructured.

If you have to get information, it can happen in a conversational way.

However, um, the, the flip side to uh agentic or generative is called deterministic, which means it's a more regulated set of flows.

We believe that there's great agentic use cases.

But also great times you wanna be deterministic, um, where ultimately you're more on the rails with the conversation and having that ability to modulate is key because, uh, it, it makes sure that anything that generative AI can do, sometimes it can wander off on different subjects if you're not careful, uh, balancing that is important.

And I think at the end of the day, Technology is there to provide value for brands and their customers.

And if the technology gets ahead of providing that value, then we, you know, we have to dial it back.

Uh, that's why working with a partner like Soundhound is important is because we are an in-production AI provider.

Meaning that it's one thing to create Something that works in this exciting demo.

It's another thing to put it in the field.

Regulations, uh, brand trust, customer confidence are things are very much in production requirements that we all have to pay attention to.

And finally, Mike, before I let you go, since you mentioned your clients, I do want to get a sense of the real world ROI that your clients are seeing across industries, whether we're talking about insurance or telecom.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the, the, the savings are clear.

Uh, for example, one of our, um, our healthcare clients, they were able to process, you know, double the transactions with our AI handling inbound customer calls.

Still with the human workforce, than just the human workforce alone.

So they've um gone on record to say they want to expand the different use cases that AI is handling because they can do more with the staff that they have.

Uh, and the staff is now solving from a customer standpoint, the tougher, more complex use cases, while the AI is handling a lot of the routines.

So you get, uh, a workforce that's engaged on the problems that really matter while the AI is balancing a lot of that out.

So we've been able to double their Their capacity, which is clear ROI, which is why they want to invest and expand.

Well, Mike, thank you so much for your time today.

I appreciate all of your insights as well as your perspective.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thanks.