{"id":93156,"title":"Panels: Audio Data for AI Labs","tagline":"We power voice AI with high-quality audio data.","body":"Hi!\n\nWe’re Aaron and Jason, and we’re building Panels.\n\n**TL;DR** — Panels builds diverse, high-quality conversational audio datasets for training Voice AI models. If you or someone you know is working on voice and needs audio data, we’d love to talk!\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auANpScmgls\n\n**Our Story**\n\nAaron and Jason met at Princeton University where they both studied Operations Research and Financial Engineering.\n\n* Aaron is a 1x world champion and 5x national champion rower. After leaving rowing, Aaron became a 2x national champion in cycling, racing on a professional team against former Tour de France winners.\n* Jason previously helped build and grow startups to millions of users and worked on the data team at Amazon. He also taught NLP at Princeton.\n\n**The problem**\n\nVoice AI is exploding: in the past three YC batches, 60+ companies have depended on voice models. But voice models live or die on the quality of their training data.\n\nLabs need datasets that reflect:\n\n* Languages (global coverage, not just English)\n* Accents (real-world variety)\n* Emotions \u0026 expressiveness (not monotone samples)\n* Demographics (ages, genders, cultural nuance)\n\nRight now, most labs struggle to source enough realistic, diverse, high-quality conversational audio.\n\n**Our solution**\n\nPanels delivers exactly that.\n\n* We have a network of 10,000+ vetted voice contributors\n* Coverage across 20+ languages and 100+ countries\n* Expressive, conversational audio datasets designed for training state-of-the-art voice models.\n\nThis makes Panels the reliable data provider for the labs building the future of Voice AI.\n\n**Who this is for**\n\n* Voice labs scaling foundational models\n* Research institutions working on speech, linguistics, and AI\n* Conversational AI startups wanting to finetune their agents\n\n**Our ask**\n\nIf you (or someone you know) is building in voice and needs high-quality audio data, we’d love to talk.\n\nEmail us at [📩founders@usepanels.com](mailto:%F0%9F%93%A9founders@usepanels.com)\u2028 or ☎️[Book a call](https://cal.com/aaron-wenk/30min)\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=93156\u0026key=user_uploads/1219845/a7f9773c-5a31-4132-b481-bbfa0ddb1f68)\n\n","slug":"OEW-panels-audio-data-for-ai-labs","created_at":"2025-08-19T19:35:10.536Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T01:48:07.030Z","total_vote_count":20,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OEW-panels-audio-data-for-ai-labs","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=93156\u0026key=user_uploads/1219845/a7f9773c-5a31-4132-b481-bbfa0ddb1f68","company":{"id":30645,"name":"Panels","slug":"panels","url":"https://www.usepanels.com/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/f6701ac45e2897f58f58412507e74dbdbfa60235.png","batch":"Summer 2025","industry":"B2B","tags":["Artificial Intelligence","B2B","Data Labeling"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30645"}}