Dad to Izzy, husband to @maggdominguez. Head of Product at @LiveKit (he/him/his)

San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2007
Ben Cherry retweeted
I just want to echo this best invention of 2026 for the @aura_frames eink It shows one picture a day. And sits on a ledge on the stairs since it doesn’t require a plug. Each day’s picture becomes a conversation in our home about the memory. time.com/collection/best-inv…
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Ben Cherry retweeted
Replying to @_josh_meyer_
It's misleading to run a benchmark focused on noise, and then specifically turn off noise cancellation in stacks where you have control. (pretty sure Grok does not give you that level control) livekit does a great job with noise/background voice when you allow it to. (and glad to see we are beating every other cascaded pipelines)
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Ben Cherry retweeted
We just raised $4M at @lightsagehq , led by @nexusvp , to build the growth stack for internet’s newest customer: AI agents. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents can already discover products, compare alternatives, read documentation, install SDKs, call APIs and start using software on behalf of humans. Soon, they’ll increasingly transact too and that changes how internet companies grow. For decades, companies built growth infrastructure around humans. PLG helped humans adopt products. Now there’s a new journey to optimize: Can an AI agent discover you, choose you, successfully use you, and eventually pay for you? We call this Agent-Led Growth. Lightsage helps companies get discovered, recommended and used by agents → Agent Discovery - when and why agents recommend you vs. competitors → Agent Experience - whether agents can successfully use your APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers and agent skills → Agent Analytics - what real agents do when they reach your website, docs and product. and most recently agent-attributed traffic conversion. Companies including @firecrawl , @reductoai , @daytonaio , @rimelabs , @Tiny_Fish and @insforge are already using Lightsage to build their agent-led growth strategy and improve their agent journey. We’re incredibly grateful to have Nexus lead this round alongside these amazing founders and operators. - Former Salesforce CTO Steven Tamm - Postman CEO @a85 - Apollo CEO Matt Curl - DocuSign President Robert Chatwani - Former GitLab Head of Growth @HilaQu - Resend CEO @zenorocha - Firecrawl Co-founder @ericciarla - Daytona CEO @ivanburazin - Tinyfish COO @shuhao_friday - Adam Frankl and many more! As agents increasingly discover, evaluate, use and pay for products on our behalf, we believe every company will need to understand and optimize for the agent channel. That’s what we’re building Lightsage for. Huge thank you to my co-founder Sean Er, customers, early investors @AlchemistAcc and everyone who believed in us early. Honoured to be featured in @Forbes . We’re just getting started. lightsage.com
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Ben Cherry retweeted
We built a patient intake agent with @spacexai that runs end to end on Grok voice models. Grok STT → Grok 4.3 → Grok TTS, cascaded through LiveKit Inference. Three model strings in one AgentSession. No separate API key, no separate billing, ZDR on every hop. Talk to it: xai.livekit.space
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Ben Cherry retweeted
Frontier models keep getting smarter…and slower. This is bad for voice agents, where every millisecond before the first word counts. So we optimized for speed. Introducing Gemma 4 31B on LiveKit Inference: 🗣️ 381ms to first sentence — 2x+ faster than the next model ✅ 88% task completion (see the criteria in reply) 💰 $1.20 / 1M output tokens Fast enough for real conversation, smart enough for effective agents.
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"With this release, we consider end-of-turn detection a solved problem for agents built on LiveKit." 🤯 Incredible work by the ML team at LiveKit
We shipped LiveKit Turn Detector v1. Instead of reading transcripts, it listens to speech directly, combining semantic and acoustic cues into one end-of-turn prediction. The result: high accuracy, low latency—the best model we tested across 14 languages. Available on LiveKit Cloud.
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Constantly amazed at how realistic and clever @interaction’s Poke is. Really unlike anything else
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I’ve been on @getcasa since the start of the year and it’s my #1 new product this year by a mile. Total life changer, seriously.
After two years of building under wraps, today we're announcing Casa – your personal property manager. We've raised $27M to redefine the homeownership experience from the ground up. We believe your home is your most treasured asset, emotionally & financially. It shouldn't also be a second job. Most homeowners are on their own – expected to have the time, expertise, and relationships to keep things running. Finding a plumber you can trust. Remembering when the HVAC was last serviced. Knowing what's actually wrong before someone shows up to fix it. Casa gives every homeowner what used to be reserved for the few: a dedicated team that knows your home deeply, handles the work, and stays in your corner. We're enabling this by building a deep, technical understanding of every home we serve – something that's never existed before, across 100 million single-family homes in the country. For $199/mo, membership includes: - A complete inventory of your home, built using specialized hardware & software - 1.5 hours of handyman time every month (and it rolls over) - Unlimited Concierge requests to take on virtually any home project - Custom, proactive care plans built specifically for your home - Weekly package and donation pickups - Scheduling and payments for your regular vendors - Utility and property tax monitoring …and we’re just getting started, with more benefits on the way to make the experience of owning your home as magical as it always should have been. Available now in the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles. Reserve your spot everywhere else. → getcasa.com
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Ben Cherry retweeted
Since livekit-wakeword release, the number one question we’ve been asked is if we support wake word in other languages. The answer is yes. By leveraging VoxCPM2 from @OpenBMB, we can generate samples in 30 languages and train on them. All local. All in a single command. All open-source.
We launched livekit-wakeword, an open-source library that lets you train a custom wake word model from scratch with a single command. It handles synthetic data generation, augmentation, training, and ONNX export all in one shot.
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Ben Cherry retweeted
if you have tried to train a wake word model before, you know the pain today we are open sourcing livekit-wakeword, a tool that lets you train production-grade wake word models with a single command on any platform compared to openwakeword, livekit-wakeword achieved dramatically better results across every metric: > 100× fewer false positives per hour > 60× lower detection error > 86% vs 69% recall this is thanks to our improvements with the data generation pipeline (diverse samples and config options), training pipeline (focal loss and label smoothing) and model architecture (attention) a big bonus: models trained with livekit-wakeword are fully backward compatible with openwakeword, so you can drop in our wake word models into your existing @home_assistant setup or any oww project check it out here github.com/livekit/livekit-w…
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Ben Cherry retweeted
Introducing Agents UI, an open-source @shadcn component library for building polished React frontends for your voice agents. Audio visualizers. Media controls. Session management tools. Chat transcripts. All wired to LiveKit Agents. Install via the shadcn CLI and own the code.
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Ben Cherry retweeted
This decision makes America less safe, today and tomorrow. Pete Hegseth just told the entire U.S. tech sector: don't make a deal with the U.S. military because my next meltdown might mark you as more dangerous than China. It turns out, nothing is undermining our military capabilities more than Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump's fragile masculinity.
This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon. Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic. Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable. As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives. Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered. In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.
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Claude is the best coder in the world and a true patriot. Anthropic is winning 2026 so far.
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Ben Cherry retweeted
The only thing more powerful than hate is love. ¡Que bueno Bad Bunny!
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Ben Cherry retweeted
Hey @ycombinator & @amiklas… we heard you’re looking for us 👀 We’d be happy to show you what we’ve built so far, and we may even have a little room left in the round. 😉 DM and check out trydotted.com
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Ben Cherry retweeted
This is absolutely shameful. Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.
Drop Site obtained harrowing footage of the latest killing which appears to be from the perspective of the woman in pink filming from the sidewalk
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Very cool to be part of this - honestly amazed almost every day by how much people love voice AI and especially how much they love using LiveKit to build it.
We learn to speak before we learn to read. Voice is the most natural interface we have. We just raised a $100M to make building voice AI as easy as a web app.
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Love love love @livekit's example repos. Every developer should have a docs MCP and instructions on how to set it up. And look at those AGENTS and CLAUDE md files
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Join us on 10/1 at 5:30p for the first Physical AI Meetup hosted by @livekit at @frontiertower. Come for robot demos, panel discussion with industry leaders, food, drinks & networking. luma.com/physical-ai-meetup
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Ben Cherry retweeted
Serverless voice agents are here. Two years ago, we worked with OpenAI to plan the ChatGPT Voice Mode launch. Voice agents were different from web apps: • sessions last minutes to hours • what’s said next depends on what was said before • UX breaks even with moderate latency • CPU/memory usage isn’t uniform Scaling voice agents is more like scaling a multiplayer video game. To do it right, you need tech for load balancing, capacity management, deploying updates, and observability. We’ve seen voice AI devs spend time building this in-house over and over — a clear sign that deployment and scaling are undifferentiated problems. So starting today, you can push your agent code directly to LiveKit Cloud and we’ll handle the hard parts for you. Try it out — and DM me your feedback.
You can now deploy AI voice agents to LiveKit Cloud. We handle: • Stateful load balancing • Capacity management • Draining and instant rollbacks • Operational observability
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