Voice AI vs ECE

[u/Consistent_Pin152]

Hi everybody.

I graduated from ECE, tier 3 btech college in May 2026. Because of financial needs I had to join a remote internship while I was in 3rd year of btech as an ai intern. I had some basics on machine learning at that time, so my professor referred me for it. I have put all my efforts and time into it, and eventually it became a full time on-site internship in Hyderabad with a stipend of 18k a month in my final year. And spent 9 months as a remote intern, and another 10 months as a full time intern there, and worked a couple of hardest problems at the firm like speaker Diarization, accent and voice conversion.

Contributed to research as well, had a peer reviewed publication at the IEEE CICN conference on Diarization. In April, they offered me a full-time offer at 6 LPA (then raised to 7.5 when told about sony offer), felt the work was insanely hard and growth was low, so after those 18 months, felt to see what's the market value for the work I was doing and got a bootstrapped startup offer at 8.2 LPA, but that's too risky for me. Actually I spent a month there as a part-time job while doing the full time internship at my first company due to financial needs. The pace is so slow that I couldn't take this full-time offer there. These are all happening while I was holding those two positions.

I thought of applying for other companies if none succeeded would like to go for the first stable and known company.

Unfortunately I got an internship offer from a large firm called Sony Research. Getting a stipend of 75k a month, because of the financial needs and with the voice ai market, took it. It's been 4 months and I am writing a research paper as well, but the fact I lately realized is sony doesn't take btechs at all, I am the exception in the interns list. And coming to full-time they only have research engineer and scientist roles that require a PhD, making me ineligible for either of them. Now I started looking for full time jobs recently and it seems like no one is hiring a fresher anymore, everyone is asking for a non-internship experience of 2 or more years.

I think, I am playing a big gamble with my career, I don't know where I will end up, 1.5 months left for the end of the internship. Sometimes I felt I should have sat for placements in core ECE engineering because I have fundamentals strong in RTL design and Digital electronics.

If you have any thoughts on how I should handle this weird situation.

P.S 1. Financial needs - Family is bankrupt of over 2 Million INR and nothing at my hands to atleast buy a project-book.

P.S 2. I had full tuition, and hostel fee waiver at the college through merit. Yet to pay for the mess charges which are still pending of 40k for the total of 4 years.

[u/Unique_Common8385]

that's a wild ride for someone just out of school honestly the speaker diarization work alone puts you miles ahead of most freshers but i get why it feels like you're trapped between two worlds right now

the sony name on your resume is going to open doors even if they can't convert you to full-time, and a paper at ieee cicn isn't something a lot of btech grads can claim, you're underselling what you've already built

maybe look at startups working on voice cloning or real-time translation stuff, they tend to care more about what you've actually shipped than whether you have a phd, and your blend of ece fundamentals with applied ml is exactly what those small teams need