Company leader
Kobus Jooste
Co-founder and CEO
Syllable
Kobus Jooste is the co-founder and chief executive of Syllable, a San Jose, California, company whose software builds AI voice and text agents for health system call centers and other businesses. He has two decades of experience in machine learning, speech recognition and natural language processing, including years as a director of software engineering at Google.
An Early Start in Computing
He came to computers at a young age and first planned to become a doctor before he chose software engineering. He was a technical leader at IBM Research, VMware and several startups in information technology and big data. He started two companies before Syllable, and one was bought by a large software company while the other shut down.
Engineering at Google
At Google he worked first on Android Pay, then on Verily through Google X, and finally on Google Assistant and the Knowledge Engine in the Google Home group. He came to feel that the success of Search and Ads made new ideas hard to push through at Google, and he left to build a company of his own.
Co-founding Syllable
He started Syllable in 2017 with Guilherme Bastos, who had led product teams at MercadoLibre and eBay. Its first products were voice and text assistants for health system call centers, and Houston Methodist used one to run its COVID-19 vaccine hotline. His stated goal was an assistant that "modernizes the healthcare contact center and improves the patient experience to be more convenient, reliable and empathetic".
On Impact and Leadership
He sees AI as a way to take cost and delay out of care while doctors keep treating patients. "I don't think there's a future where you would go into a room and talk to a box, and it's replacing a doctor," he said in a 2022 interview. He holds that leadership is the soul of a startup, and that a chief executive's job can be a lonely one in the early years.