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ByNN Desk
Wispr Flow Ropes In Alexa Scientist Ariya Rastrow
Ariya Rastrow has joined voice AI startup Wispr Flow as Chief Scientist, leading the company's research and development. Wispr Flow CEO Tanay Kothari announced the move on LinkedIn.
Rastrow, a founding member of the Amazon Alexa team and most recently a Distinguished AI Lead at Meta, will lead R&D at the voice AI startup.
Ariya Rastrow has joined voice AI startup Wispr Flow as Chief Scientist, leading the company’s research and development. Wispr Flow CEO Tanay Kothari announced the move on LinkedIn.
Rastrow brings nearly two decades in speech and voice AI. He joined Amazon in 2012 as a founding member of the team that launched Alexa, and spent 13 years at the company across roles including Research Scientist, Senior Scientist, and Principal Scientist, most recently serving as Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon AGI. There, he led development of speech-to-speech and multi-modal Amazon Nova foundation models, and served as technical lead for core speech and language innovation across Alexa, Fire TV, and other Amazon services, with a focus on low-latency real-time speech recognition and generation for both edge and cloud.
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He moved to Meta in May 2025 as a Distinguished AI Lead, working on voice and multi-modal AI foundation models for the company’s wearable and Reality Labs devices.
Rastrow earned his PhD at the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University. He holds more than 50 publications and 45 issued US patents.
In his announcement, Kothari said Rastrow had been a Wispr Flow user before joining, and described him as a researcher who thinks about machine learning in terms of the end-user experience. “He’s my sparring partner now on every major product decision we make,” Kothari wrote.
Wispr Flow, founded in 2021 by Kothari and Sahaj Garg, makes AI-powered voice dictation software for Mac, Windows, and iOS.
This story is based on a LinkedIn post by Wispr Flow CEO Tanay Kothari. Rastrow’s own LinkedIn profile had not been updated to reflect the move at the time of publication.
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