Thor Schaeff

From Transcription to Live Music: Gemini's Audio Stack — Thor Schaeff, Google DeepMind

Jun 9, 2026 · 19:34

Thor Schaeff from Google DeepMind presents the Gemini audio stack—Gemini 3 Flash Preview for deep audio understanding, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live for real-time sound-to-sound multimodal interaction, and Lyria 3 for music generation. He shows how a single API call extracts speaker labels, timestamps, emotions, language detection, and translation, and how speech generation uses a 'director's note' to modify a base voice's accent and tone. The talk culminates in a live demo where the Gemini Live model uses Lyria via tool calls to generate a German techno schlager about the UK startup scene.

Building Conversational Agents — Thor Schaeff and Philipp Schmid, Google DeepMind

Apr 30, 2026 · 1:47:34

Thor Schaeff and Philipp Schmid of Google DeepMind demonstrate building conversational agents with the Gemini Interactions API and Live API, arguing that the new Interactions API simplifies agent development by introducing server-side state management, unified content blocks, and remote MCP support. They walk through creating a coding agent with read/write file and bash tools using Gemini 3 Flash, highlighting how the model uses tool calling to execute commands and return results. The Live API, powering real-time voice and video interactions, supports native multilingual audio, tool calling, and Google Search grounding, though the presenters acknowledge its current limitations in production, including lack of session transcript retrieval and shorter context windows (15 minutes audio-only). They showcase a Live Jukebox demo integrating Lyria 3 music generation and discuss business use cases like Shopify Sidekick, Waymo, and elderly companion apps, emphasizing that while the technology is ready for experimentation, production readiness depends on partner integrations for observability and compliance.

[Full Workshop] Building Conversational AI Agents - Thor Schaeff, ElevenLabs

Jul 31, 2025 · 1:01:42

Thor Schaeff of ElevenLabs demonstrates how to build multilingual conversational AI agents using ElevenLabs' platform, which combines speech-to-text (ASR) with 99-language support, a voice library of over 5,000 voices, and language detection system tools that automatically switch between 31 languages (with plans to expand). The agent pipeline transcribes user speech, feeds it to any LLM (like GPT-4 or Gemini), and streams the response back as speech for low-latency conversations. Schaeff shows real-time language switching in Mandarin, Hindi, and English, and explains how to assign per-language voices (e.g., Chennai-accented Tamil). He addresses safety tooling—voice watermarking, live moderation, and consent verification—and discusses cost (per-minute pricing), latency mitigation via Flash models and RAG, and handling multi-language mixing within a single utterance, though accuracy degrades with more than two languages intermixed.