Amu Varma is a co-founder of Canopy Labs, which develops models for digital humans and speech. He contributes to Canopy’s Orpheus speech repository under the name Amartya Varma. His early public work with Elias Fizesan explored simulated interviews, making a conversational system people could practice pitching to.[4][3][1][2]
Start with An interview-practice product →
Contributions
Build a conversational product around a specific task
Varma’s launch account describes creating AI versions of Y Combinator partners with Elias Fizesan. The product offered a way to rehearse a short, critical founder interview, giving the conversation a recognizable task and style. The simulated interviewers were not the real partners or their endorsements.[4]
Develop speech as part of a digital human
Canopy’s Orpheus release uses a Llama-based backbone for speech synthesis. The repository includes pretrained and fine-tuned models, streaming examples and training guidance. For Varma, this is a company release associated with his co-founder role, not a claim that he personally implemented every model component.[5]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
An interview-practice productlinkedin.comA founder’s original explanation of the simulated-interviewer product and its purpose.
Read the original interview-practice example to understand the intended interaction. No setup is needed; the linked historical product may have changed.
Co-builder with Elias Fizesan[4]
Tools
- Orpheus TTS
github.comCanopy’s open speech-generation models, training guidance and streaming examples.
Company release; co-founder[5]