Building the Future of Voice AI From Soundtracks to Synthetic Speech With Stu Kennedy, Edge, Real...

In this episode of A Class Act, Michael chats with Stu Kennedy, an Edge, Realtime & AI Systems Consultant, core HTMX contributor, and former film composer who worked alongside David Arnold on the Chronicles of Narnia and BBC’s Sherlock.  Today, Stu builds real-time voice AI pipelines, contributes to the WebSocket layer in HTMX 4, and has helped companies like Anam and Pyannote push the boundaries of streaming diarisation and video avatars.  In this conversation, they get into: ✔ How a career in maths, music, and film led to building production voice AI systems ✔ Why voice AI is fundamentally an audio problem before it’s an ML one ✔ Why platforms like VAPI, OpenAI Realtime, and others break outside demo ✔ How Stu cut ASR latency from two seconds to 350 milliseconds  ✔ Why a single senior engineer with the right tools can now outship a six-month procurement cycle ✔ LLMs and the parallels between constraining a model and constraining an orchestra ✔ An experiment where professional composers couldn’t tell a real orchestral recording from a fake one and what that really means for AI adoption ✔ A real benchmark for production readiness Guest Information Stu Kennedy is an Edge, Realtime & AI Systems Consultant specialising in Cloudflare-native, real-time, and AI-driven platforms. He has spent 25 years at the intersection of mathematics, music, and software, from a PhD in fluid mechanics and chaos theory to composing for film alongside David Arnold (James Bond, Narnia, Sherlock), to building music technology platforms, and now engineering production voice AI pipelines.  He is a core contributor to HTMX, building the WebSocket implementation for HTMX 4, and has worked with companies including Anam (real-time video avatars) and Pyannote (streaming diarization). Stu has also built products including Callwell, a real-time AI sales call assistant, and Medascend, an AI-powered medical training platform built with students from Dundee University. He operates via his Ltd company on scoped, outcome-based engagements. Connect with Stu Kennedy on LinkedIn:   / stu-kennedy   Website: https://stukennedy.com Also built: html.surf (https://html.surf) About Your Host Michael Young is the Managing Director of MBN Solutions and host of A Class Act: Conversations in Data & Leadership. With nearly two decades of experience helping organisations build high-performing data, analytics, and AI teams, he brings frontline insight into what makes exceptional talent and leadership. Please note: The views expressed by the guest in this episode are their own and do not reflect those of their current or former employers. Subscribe & Follow Enjoying the series? Don’t miss an episode. Follow A Class Act wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review to help more listeners discover these conversations in data and leadership. Connect with MBN Solutions If you’re hiring for data or AI leadership roles, scaling AI capability, or rethinking how talent supports your AI strategy, the team at MBN partners with organisations to build data and AI teams that actually deliver. MBN Solutions on LinkedIn – Explore industry updates, groundbreaking projects, and the latest in data and analytics talent. Join the conversation and discover how MBN Solutions is shaping the future of data leadership. Visit the company page here. For questions, guest recommendations, or to connect: Email: [email protected] Visit MBN Solutions website at www.mbnsolutions.com