Benjamin Dorr, CEO of WellSaid – Interview Series

Benjamin Dorr is the CEO of WellSaid and brings 20+ years of experience operating and investing in early-stage and growth-stage companies, primarily in technology. Immediately prior to WellSaid, Benjamin was the COO of Cordial, an enterprise cross-channel marketing platform and 2x Deloitte Fast 500 selection. He's also served in cross-functional executive roles at Valassis Digital, Rustic Pathways, Rhythm NewMedia, and Counsyl.  Benjamin started his career at Citi, Morgan Stanley, and The Carlyle Group, and he has a bachelor's degree from Harvard in computer science and public policy.

Since its founding in 2019, WellSaid has leveraged advanced text-to-speech technology to create ultra-realistic, premium AI voices by carefully sourcing professional voice actors and building its own AI platform. The company offers enterprise-ready solutions—such as its Studio tool for collaborative voice-over creation and an API for seamless integration—helping teams in marketing, training, video production, and product development deliver consistent, on-brand audio. Guided by strong values and responsible AI principles, WellSaid prioritizes trust, quality, and ethical deployment to ensure engaging, high-emotion, believable audio experiences.

You’ve had a fascinating journey—from investment banking and VC to helping scale mission-driven companies. How have these diverse experiences shaped your leadership approach and vision for WellSaid?

Before I co-founded my first startup in 2006, I was lucky enough to experience an approach to leadership that shaped how I manage. In my early career, I landed with an amazing investor named Ed Mathias whose leadership and investing style resonated with me. He built everyone up around him and considered his network his greatest asset. He looked for diamonds in the rough in addition to consensus winners, and he argued that because there are lots of ways to make money, you can optimize for other things–intellectual curiosity, people you enjoy working with, what helps the world, etc.

AI voice has evolved rapidly in just a few years. What’s the biggest leap forward you think is coming next—and how is WellSaid preparing for it?

Ubiquity. As the quality of AI voice increases, the number of use cases are going up, from internal one-to-many communication such as training and enablement to external one-to-many communication such as marketing. At the same time, the underlying cost of AI voice is approaching the levels of traditional text-to-speech, meaning more folks can make use of AI voice. With the launch of Caruso – our most recent model – and our overall data pipeline, we’re pushing our innovation forward in both quality and cost. This is one of the advantages of being vertically integrated in AI from data set to model to application.

Synthetic voices are everywhere now—from audiobooks to customer service bots. How do you ensure WellSaid’s voices remain trusted and human-centric in this fast-expanding space?

Humans are at the core of every aspect of WellSaid. WellSaid’s closed-source voice technology is built on responsibly licensed voice data from paid actors. But our voice actors are more than training data, they are true collaborators throughout the process. And our customers are not simply testers, but they are partners in developing the perfect voice for every application. Every feature in the WellSaid platform reflects this, giving users the ability to retake a line, emphasize a word, or instantly update content without compromising quality, consistency, or rights.

Every voice is production-ready and commercially cleared for public or client-facing content.

WellSaid emphasizes “responsible AI.” What does that look like in practice when developing new voice models?

WellSaid sets the standard for responsible AI with a robust framework centered around fairness, transparency, privacy and security, and content moderation.

WellSaid hires real voice actors, ensuring their explicit, written consent to provide voice data to the platform and compensates them fairly with ongoing revenue share. To protect their privacy and security, WellSaid uses stock images and aliases to represent the synthetic voices and encourages them to exercise caution about sharing their association with WellSaid to reduce the risk of others misusing their voice.

To prevent the spread of misinformation and audio deep fakes from voice cloning, WellSaid users are unable to upload voice data from politicians, celebrities, or anyone else unless WellSaid has that person’s explicit, written consent. WellSaid also maintains strict standards for appropriate content, prohibiting the use of voices for content that is harmful, hateful, fraudulent, or intended to incite violence.

WellSaid ensures that content always belongs to the creator, guaranteeing users own the intellectual property and copyright protections over the material or content created on the platform.

Through WellSaid’s extensive protections, we are setting the industry expectations for what responsible AI voice should look like in production.

WellSaid aims to offer the “highest quality-to-cost ratio” in the industry. What innovations—technical, operational, or strategic—will help you deliver on that promise?

At WellSaid, we prioritize vertically integrating our entire product pipeline. Within Caruso, a good example is our in-house developed vocoder which allows us to train at 1/10th of the number of parameters as a common tool such as BigVGAN, and we can do so at 2x the audio quality. Strategically, we’ve been deliberate about delivering on quality over breadth (such as offering every language). In doing so, we may have lost some business–but it’s at the expense of delivering a higher quality, lower cost product to our core audience.

As generative AI tools flood the market, how do you see the role of AI voice evolving in enterprise settings over the next 3–5 years?

AI is not a brand new frontier, instead, it is part of a familiar pattern. Like the rise of mobile devices or the early internet, AI marks a shift that challenges teams to rethink how content is created, how people engage with software, and how voice represents a brand.

Over the next few years, enterprise companies will be unable to avoid AI voice, as they were unable to avoid other tech revolutions of the past. As AI voice quality continues to improve, along with lower costs and simpler workflows than traditional voice actor content, AI voice will become the standard for corporate content such as advertising, learning and development, video production, and more.

Do you see a future where companies deeply personalize AI voice for brand identity—perhaps even licensing voices like they license music or characters today?

Many companies have very distinct voices in their brand identity, consistently using the same memorable voice actor or celebrity spokesperson across their content. AI voice enables any company to build that same recognition for less. AI voices can be just as dynamic and personalized as traditional voice acting, and brands will soon become synonymous with their AI voices – some already have.

You’ve stressed the importance of company culture and values in building great companies. How are you applying that philosophy now at WellSaid?

I tend to agree with the idea that a great culture is working with great people, so maximizing talent density, impact, and chemistry are all critical initiatives for our leadership team. WellSaid’s principles are how we aim to work together, providing calls to action for each team member as opposed to a static virtue. The following principles are what help us achieve a great company culture:

• We invent technology that revolutionizes the way people work.

• We act responsibly and strive to minimize harm.

• We put customers at the center of everything we do.

• We respect individuality while recognizing we work best as a team.

• We aim to build a great company that we can always be proud of.

How do you think about the ethical implications of creating voices that are indistinguishable from real humans? What responsibilities come with that?

While the rise of AI has brought ethical challenges and concerns, WellSaid made the decision from the start to prioritize transparency and compliance. It’s our responsibility as a company to prevent misuse, deepfakes, or the spread of misinformation. This includes working with voice talent to create custom voices that are licensed for specific use cases, establishing clear controls over who can use these voices, and for what purpose. It’s also the responsibility of brands using AI voice, ensuring they’re partnering with reputable AI providers that have these safeguards in place.

What excites you most about the next chapter for WellSaid—and what do you think will surprise the industry about where AI voice is headed?

We talk about the number of “Words WellSaid” as a north star for our team. I’m excited to see those words grow as more companies continue to see the value in AI voice to deliver human-centered messages to their audiences at scale. As the use of AI voice continues to expand, people will be surprised by how seamless it will be to adopt the technology across a wide variety of use cases. The possibilities are endless for AI voice and audio as an interface in both software and physical environments.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit WellSaid.