Scaling the expertise of the people best at hard conversations.
High-stakes conversations are universal, costly and still taught one expert at a time. TalkLab turns that expertise into voice AI that teaches, simulates and assesses, grounded in psychology research from the University of Toronto.
- 01
The expert gap
The best conversational experts inside organisations are scarce, and their skill has been nearly impossible to scale to everyone who needs it.
- 02
An emotion model, not a script
Personas carry an emotional state grounded in established psychological frameworks, and every conversation adds training data that generic models can't access.
- 03
Research credibility
High-stakes sectors need evidence and reliability. TalkLab's founders are researchers with a track record of deploying learning technology at scale.
- Conversations
- 10K+
- Hours of conversation
- 500+
- Public beta launch
- Oct 31, 2026
- Pilots and demos in progress
- 11
The founders
Dr. Steve Joordens
Chief Executive Officer
Full-time Professor at UTSC, co-founder of peerScholar, 3M National Teaching Fellow, and a global leader in psychology and assessment research.
Dr. Brian Harrington
Chief Research Officer
Professor at UTSC. Computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and AI, co-directing TalkLab at UTSC.
Robin Walker
Chief Technology Officer
CTO of peerScholar, with a deep track record building and overseeing educational technology deployments for 100k+ students in 10 countries.
Sean Ramsay
Chief Operating Officer
30+ year career in tech. Founder, veteran digital media innovator, start-up mentor and philanthropist, with 7 patents. Inventor of the first consumer 360º camera.
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