Voice Research Club at SF Tech Week (dinner + paper readings by builders of NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization and Meta Muse TTS)
Voice Research Club is a Voice Arena initiative in collaboration with the Bay Area Frontier Research Club.
Designed by researchers, for researchers, VRC will convene the voice and speech community for recurring, paper-driven technical sessions centered on current work, open problems, and rigorous discussion.
VRC is research-first and discussion-led. It is not a demo day, vendor showcase, or pitch event. Researchers from companies, universities, and independent labs are welcome; sales presentations are not.
Sessions are shaped by community paper submissions and recommendations, with final selections curated for technical rigor and discussion value.
The evening will feature two concise technical presentations followed by an extended research discussion. The talks provide the substrate; the Q&A is the main event.
Agenda
5:30pm: Doors open
5:30pm – 6:30pm: Networking + light dinner
6:30pm – 8:00pm: Research presentations + discussion
8:00pm – 8:30pm: Networking
Presenters & topics
Talk 1 — Nishant Nikhil - Meta Muse TTS
Nishant Nikhil is a Research Engineer at Meta, where he developed the voice technology powering Meta AI and Meta’s wearable devices across 25 languages. Previously, he developed voice-cloning and Text-to-Speech technology at PlayAI, which was acquired by Meta.
His talk will explore emergent capabilities in Text-to-Speech systems, and how increasingly capable speech models can exhibit behaviors beyond their original training objectives.
X: nishnik
LinkedIn: nishant-nikhil
Talk 2 — Taejin Park - NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization
Taejin Park is an engineering manager at NVIDIA, leading the teams behind multi-speaker ASR and speaker diarization — most recently the Nemotron 3 Diarization model.
LinkedIn: taejin-park-099393a3
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZmUDgEMAAAAJ&hl=en
Want to Present Your Work?
If you have a research paper you would like to discuss at a future Voice Research Club session, submit it for consideration.
Who Should Attend
Speech, audio, and multimodal researchers
Research engineers building TTS, STT, speech-to-speech, or voice-agent systems
Teams working on voice benchmarks, datasets, infrastructure, and evaluation
Technical founders and product leaders building in voice AI
Researchers working on multilingual speech, accessibility, safety, or human-computer interaction
Investors and ecosystem leaders with an active technical interest in the category
Capacity is limited. Registration requires approval.
We will take photos and short video clips for event recap and promotion. By attending, you consent to being photographed and recorded, and to the use of those images and clips by the organizers on social media and other event marketing channels.
Hosted by
The Frontier Syndicate
The Frontier Syndicate connects frontier-technology researchers, builders, and investors through curated research forums, build nights, private dinners, and early-stage capital. Its Frontier Research Club is a recurring forum for rigorous technical discussion—built around current work, open questions, and high-signal exchange across the Bay Area research ecosystem.
Voice Arena
Voice Arena is building the evaluation layer for voice AI. Its TTS and STT leaderboards compare leading voice models across languages, use cases, and deployment conditions, giving researchers and builders a clearer view of where the frontier is moving.
Array Ventures
Array Ventures is a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm backing deeply technical founders from inception through Series A, with a focus on AI infrastructure, data, security, and enterprise software. Through Array AI Labs, the team also builds and experiments with frontier AI tooling alongside the founders it supports.