Joining Anam as Founding Product Engineer

Today I'm joining Anam as a Founding Product Engineer. I'll be focused on the product experience across Lab and the SDK, helping people try our AI avatars and build products with them.

It's a move that brings together my work as an engineer, my experience founding Codify and my ambition to build more of my career around AI. I'm excited to join a company at a stage where I can help shape the product as we build it.

What Anam is building#

Anam builds photorealistic AI personas you can have a live conversation with. You speak to a face on screen, and it answers with a voice and expressions generated as the conversation happens. The personas support multiple languages and can respond to follow-up questions and interruptions.

Founded by Caoimhe Murphy and Ben Carr, the company is developing its own models and infrastructure for these interactions. Its conversation engine brings language models and speech together with CARA, Anam's model for generating the face, lip movements and expressions. The API lets other teams bring those personas into their own products.

There are some compelling things to build with that: a language tutor you can practise speaking with, a character for a training exercise, or a support experience where you can talk through a problem. The common thread is a two-way conversation that responds to the person using it.

Bringing a founder's perspective#

I founded Codify to work on AI development and consultancy. Joining Anam gives me an opportunity to bring that entrepreneurial background into a founding product role, with the focus of building a product over time alongside a team.

That combination appeals to me. I want to be involved in deciding what we build, understanding who it's for and getting it into their hands. Being able to move between those questions and the code is the kind of engineer I want to be.

AI is central to that direction. It opens up possibilities for products that I'm keen to explore, and I want to do that by building and putting them in front of people. Anam gives me a concrete place to focus that ambition: making live AI conversations something people can use and build on.

What I want to build#

My focus will be the product experience across Lab and the SDK.

For Lab, I want to build out a product that makes Anam easy to explore. Someone should be able to try a persona, understand the choices available to them and get a conversation running. I'll be working on how those steps fit together, so people can spend their time trying ideas and seeing what the technology can do.

For the SDK, the goal is a developer experience that makes it straightforward to bring Anam into an application. That means an understandable API, useful examples and documentation that helps someone get from their first integration to an experience they can ship. I want developers to have a clear route into the product and enough control to make it their own.

The two belong together. Lab gives people a place to explore the product; the SDK lets them take it further. I want both to feel like parts of the same experience, with what someone learns in Lab helping them when they start building.

I'm looking forward to bringing my engineering and founder experience to that work, and to learning from the team as we build Anam. If you're exploring what a conversational AI product could look like, take a look at Anam. I'll be sharing more as I settle into the role and we start shipping.