About

I'm Alec, co-founder and CTO of ThunderPhone. We build AI voice agents that handle real phone calls for businesses.

Based in San Francisco, I’ve spent most of my career building applied AI systems, starting before the current LLM era, working across computer vision, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and conversational AI.

I got my start on self-driving cars at Uber ATG, then worked on conversational AI at Expedia, building intent classification and language-understanding systems before large language models made that kind of work dramatically easier. At Sea Machines, I worked on computer vision and autonomous systems for marine vessels.

In 2023, I was the solo founder of SensorSurf (YC W23), where I built data infrastructure for robot fleets. Today, I’m building ThunderPhone, which helps businesses automate phone calls with AI.

I studied computer science at Ohio State and CU Boulder, where my graduate research in computer vision was published at ECCV 2022. You can find the fuller chronology on my Background page.

ThunderPhone logo

ThunderPhone

Other projects

TranslateMyCall logo

TranslateMyCall

A free app that interprets phone calls between languages in real time, with no human interpreter in the loop.

translatemycall.com ↗
Pedigree logo

Genealogy

My genealogy research published as an interactive family tree: generations of Bells, traced and sourced.

View the family tree →

Photos

Aug 2026

Hello, world

What this site is, and what I plan to put here.

© 2026 Alexander T. Bell San Francisco, CA
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