
Zapier's CEO vs. the AI agent hype machine. Wade Foster, who built Zapier into the automation backbone of millions of small businesses, is hosting a free virtual event on September 23 called ZapConnect. He's bringing in leaders from Glean and Crunchbase to answer a question that should be on every owner's mind: when does an AI agent actually beat a plain if-then workflow, and when is it just a more expensive way to do the same thing? Over 13,000 people are expected, with 30+ sessions. The honest framing, that AI isn't always the right call, is exactly why this one is worth an hour of your time. If you've been pitched on agents without a clear return-on-investment case, this is where you go to get your bearings. Register free at ZapConnect.
AI phone agents that don't sound like robots reading from a script. Anyone who's tried building a voice AI knows the frustrating part: the thing sounds fine on a single sentence, then goes flat or stumbles the moment a caller interrupts or the conversation takes a turn. Deepgram's new Flux TTS is built differently. Instead of generating speech one line at a time, it reads the whole conversation before it speaks, so it can match tone to context, recover cleanly after an interruption, and sound consistent from the first word to the last. On September 29 they're running a live demo using the open-source Pipecat framework, with reference code included. If you're building or evaluating an AI phone system for customer support or booking, this is worth watching. Details at Deepgram.
Tools Worth a Look
Flux TTS (Deepgram): Text-to-speech that reads the full conversation before speaking, so AI voice agents stay consistent and recover after interruptions. Built for phone agents and real-time voice workflows. Pricing not listed.
Trending on GitHub
addyosmani/agent-skills: A collection of production-quality engineering skills for AI coding agents, basically a skills library you hand to an AI so it can handle real dev tasks without making beginner mistakes. (680 stars today)
Tencent/BrowserSkill: Lets an AI agent use your actual logged-in browser, same sessions, same cookies, without interrupting what you're doing. Think of it as giving the AI a seat at your desk without handing it the keyboard. (1,302 stars today)
anthropics/claude-code: Claude's coding tool that lives in your terminal, reads your codebase, and handles routine tasks like explaining code or managing version control through plain-English commands. (538 stars today)
Tencent/WeKnora: An open-source platform that takes your raw documents and turns them into a searchable knowledge base, a reasoning agent that can answer questions against them, and a self-updating internal Wiki. Like giving your file cabinet a brain. (1,125 stars today)
Also Worth Knowing
One AAA Accelerator member shipped a full van rental platform: booking system, back-office CRM and all, as a second project for a sales partner he met inside the community. A concrete example of AI-assisted development turning one client into repeat work.
-Scott
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.
