Speaking and events
Where Naomi Carrigan speaks, hosts and shows up for developer communities, with companion guides for the talks and workshops she gives.
Coming up
Upcoming
A one-day event for teams building and deploying voice agents in production, hosted by the Agentic AI Foundation, which is under the Linux Foundation, together with the MLOps Community. Naomi will staff a Deepgram table. Her colleague Sam Gutentag, Deepgram’s Senior Developer Advocate, will give a lightning talk.
Upcoming
A two-day voice AI summit on what is working and what is next. Naomi will staff Deepgram’s booth.
Past events
Deepgram’s one-day conference for the people building voice AI, where Deepgram unveiled its new brand and announced its acquisition of Daily, the company behind the open-source voice agent framework Pipecat. Naomi ran the room for the Builder’s Lab, a drop-in mission track built and presented by Corey Weathers and supported by the Developer Relations team. With no sign-up and no API key, attendees talked to a Deepgram voice agent in their browser and tuned it one layer at a time: hearing, timing, thinking and voice. Missions ranged from getting the agent to wait while someone reads out a phone number, to following a switch of language mid-conversation, to giving it a secret identity for other players to guess. Every mission was also published as a Python and TypeScript project, so builders could carry the settings they had tuned into their own code. Naomi also hosted the HackMIT team who won the Deepgram track with Braillie, a project that uses Deepgram to give spoken guidance to people learning Braille, and recorded a demo of it with them on the expo stage.
Staffed Deepgram’s expo booth across both days of the congress, talking with developers about voice AI. The booth ran live demos of Deepgram’s latest text-to-speech and a talking-avatar voice agent.
Co-hosted an evening for the Bay Area developer community at Deepgram’s new San Francisco event space, together with Dana, Deepgram’s Community Engineer for the Bay Area. Attendees took part in a new workshop on building a voice agent with an avatar, and gave feedback to help shape it for the wider community.
Attended as a Deepgram sponsor and sat on the judging panel for Medplum and Y Combinator’s Agentic Healthcare Hackathon, alongside judges from YC and Medplum. Hacks were scored on potential clinical impact and effective use of the provided technologies, including Deepgram, Medplum, moss.dev, and Stedi.
Attended as a Deepgram sponsor and ran a workshop on building a fully functional voice AI agent from scratch. Covered the full real-time loop: audio capture, low-latency transcription, LLM reasoning with context, and streaming text-to-speech back fast enough to feel like a real conversation. Dug into the design decisions that matter most in production: interruption handling, conversation state, and keeping latency low. Attendees left with a clear mental model of how voice agents work under the hood and a working architecture they could ship at the hackathon that same day.
A Pride month session for the Deepgram all-hands focused on practical allyship in distributed teams, not policy. Covering five concrete daily habits any colleague can adopt immediately: names and pronouns, navigating questions, confidentiality, speaking up when queer colleagues are not in the room, and the cumulative weight of inclusive language. The session opened with a moment of genuine celebration of Pride’s origins, addressed the current landscape honestly, and closed with a tiered action list and a reframe: treating queer colleagues as simply normal gives back energy that would otherwise be spent just existing in those spaces.
A talk on building a real AI agent, not a chatbot, as a solo developer with ADHD. Naomi walked through the five core pieces of an agent (brain, identity, hands, memory, ears), demystified common overcomplication around MCP, hooks, and gateways, and shared the safety framework that lets her grant broad filesystem and repo access without it being reckless. Built solo on Claude Code with MCP servers, a Discord gateway listener, and an Electron desktop app. The talk ended with a four-step starter kit attendees could build that same evening.
Naomi’s first event in the Seattle tech scene. A wonderful couple of days in the Pacific Northwest JavaScript community, and a great chance to catch up with Amanda, Head of DevRel at Vapi and a Deepgram partner.
A Pride month all-hands talk on cultivating inclusive, safe online communities for LGBTQ+ people: pronoun roles, codes of conduct, consistent enforcement, and the business case for community health.
Talks and companion guides
Written companions to talks and workshops, with the ideas, steps and links from each session.
A hands-on workshop covering the full real-time voice AI loop: audio capture, low-latency transcription, LLM reasoning, and streaming text-to-speech.
A practical, no-overhaul-required guide to the daily habits that make a measurable difference to LGBTQ+ colleagues in a distributed team.
A field guide to wiring together an LLM, tools, context, and triggers into a real agent that does real work: not a chatbot you prompt, but a coworker you trust.
A Pride month all-hands talk on cultivating inclusive, safe online communities for LGBTQ+ people: pronoun roles, codes of conduct, consistent enforcement, and the business case for community health.
