← Cartesia
Cartesia role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
Real-time voice AI: lifelike text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and voice agents that developers add to their products.
Who you'd be calling
Engineering leads, product managers, and heads of AI at software companies and enterprises building voice agents, call automation, or voice features.
Your opener
“Hi Taylor, this is Alex from Cartesia. We make voice AI that sounds natural and responds in real time, and teams use it to build voice agents. Are you or your team working on anything with voice right now?”
Problems you solve for them
- Voice assistants that sound robotic or respond with an awkward delay
- Hard to support many languages and accents accurately
- Building voice features from scratch takes a lot of engineering time
Discovery questions to ask
- Are you building or planning any voice features, like phone agents or voice assistants?
- What do you use today for speech, and how happy are you with the quality and speed?
- Which languages or use cases matter most for your customers?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm busy right now.”
→ No worries, I'll keep this short. Is voice something on your roadmap this year, and if so, can we grab 15 minutes next week?
“Not interested.”
→ Fair enough. Can I ask if that's because voice isn't a priority, or because you already have something that works?
“We already use another voice provider.”
→ Makes sense, many teams do. Would you be open to testing our voices side by side with yours, to compare speed and quality?
“Just send me an email.”
→ Happy to. What would be most helpful to see: voice samples, speed numbers, or a developer demo?
Competitors worth knowing
ElevenLabs, Deepgram, OpenAI, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
Interview tips for this company
- Learn the basics: text-to-speech (computer reads text aloud), speech-to-text (computer writes down speech), and latency (how fast it responds).
- This is a developer-focused product, so practice asking about technical use cases and finding who owns the decision, such as engineering or product.
Written from public information about Cartesia to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.