---
title: "FDE Playbook: Build an AI Support Agent and Give It a Voice"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-06-30"
time: "11:10am-11:30am"
track: "Expo Stage 4"
room: "Expo Stage 4 SE"
speakers: ["Matt Lawler"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "Expo Stage 4"
scheduleRoom: "Expo Stage 4 SE"
scheduleLabels: ["Expo Stage 4", "Expo Stage 4 SE", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# FDE Playbook: Build an AI Support Agent and Give It a Voice

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 11:10am-11:30am
- Track/room: Expo Stage 4 · Expo Stage 4 SE
- Speaker(s): Matt Lawler
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: Expo Stage 4
- Room: Expo Stage 4 SE
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
Bio: Matt Lawler leads FDE for Onboarding at AssemblyAI, helping teams ship speech-to-text and voice AI to production, from model selection and architecture through deployment and scale. Description: Most support bots can read. Joey can talk back. In this session, AssemblyAI's Forward Deployed Engineer Lead, Matt Lawler, shares how his team built Joey, an AI support agent that increased end-to-end resolution rates from 10% to 75%. He'll walk through the architecture, key lessons learned, and how the team extended Joey into a fully voice-enabled agent.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[matt-lawler]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# FDE Playbook: Build an AI Support Agent and Give It a Voice ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 11:10am-11:30am - Track/room: Expo Stage 4 · Expo Stage 4 SE - Speaker(s): Matt Lawler - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: Expo Stage 4 - Room: Expo Stage 4 SE - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description Bio: Matt Lawler leads FDE for Onboarding at AssemblyAI, helping teams ship speech-to-text and voice AI to production, from model selection and architecture through deployment and scale. Description: Most support bots can read. Joey can talk back. In this session, AssemblyAI's Forward Deployed Engineer Lead, Matt Lawler, shares how his team built Joey, an AI support agent that increased end-to-end resolution rates from 10% to 75%.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[matt-lawler|Matt Lawler]] — Forward Deployed Engineer Lead at [[assemblyai|AssemblyAI]].

### Topics Covered
- Topic links are pending transcript-backed classification.

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.