Voice AI

“If you use voice AI from ChatGPT right now, It sucks. It's too slow. The LLM is much dumber than the core LLM. The escalation to the higher quality LLM is pretty weak.”

“Voice AI is commodity. That's not the future. No one is going to make money in the long run on just being a standalone, simple vanilla voice AI company. You have to build enterprise grade deep platforms.”

“If you're trying to learn about a topic, for example, pretty good is probably better than just generating a podcast because a podcast assumes like some certain understanding. Maybe it's, maybe, maybe it thinks you understand too much, too little. Whereas voice…”

“A lot of what we see when people are building these systems is that they're struggling to understand how to bring latency down while keeping the overall intelligence of the system as high as possible. That is the biggest challenge a lot of these folks face.”

“I always viewed this journey as similar to self-driving cars, where You know, it wasn't a question of like, oh, is the product market fit going to come? It was like, no, the technology just sucks. And as it gets better and better, you're going to continuously …”

“I think one of the hacks was to use ordinary phone call as an interface. Actually, that was our starting point. We don't use any applications, any software, and that was a smart move because obviously phone call is the Common routine for senior population.”

“My strategic bet is on voice.ai, because It's not just easier for non-digitalized people, but for example, when you get, you're getting old, you're starting to have some problems with your eyes, for example, yeah and other kind of stuff, and actually hear voic…”

“It's the architecture that matters, not the scale. You really need to change how the model operates.”

“I think the adoption of voice AI until now hasn't been as fast as the technology would have actually enabled enabled that. Because those conversational models are out there, and they are already pretty good, but yet we are not using them so much.”

“And so the obvious thing that you want to accomplish is a model An AI that works much more like you and I do, right? That's able to process input at the same time it's processing output. And all of that is, of course, something that many people in this field a…”

“The obvious thing that you want to accomplish is a model An AI that works much more like you and I do, right? That's able to process input at the same time it's processing output. And all of that is, of course, something that many people in this field are tryi…”

“AI is really coming everywhere, and so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode.”

“First, you know, I think the first sort of realization is that this technology is great for Large consumer businesses, but you wouldn't use it in a B to B environment. Like we wouldn't have our own AI agent do the customer success for our product with our cust…”

“And what we believe fundamentally is that the number of phone calls that happen will actually grow exponentially because it will become so painless and pleasant that you'll actually prefer picking up the phone because it will be the quickest path to resolution…”

“I think this year it should be in the automotive Site two, or some of the applications. John Collison: Okay, so you think we'll start seeing kind of great voice models in cars this year? Mati Staniszewski: This year for their own cloud use cases, like on, on, …”

“I feel in India, voice has taken off a lot faster than text. In other geographies, text and other modalities still dominate.”

“I do think it most likely will be the most natural form factor given it's already one of the key devices.”

“From my perspective, the most clear entry point is combining a domain expertise in one of the domains that you know well, or you want to know well and learn quickly. And it can be a domain where, where there's like no innovation, and these are like almost the …”

“Whether that's voice dictation, whether that's like a voice pin that answers questions or does tasks for you, I think that is going to spread to the mainstream consumer in the next six to nine months.”

“The voice space is a existing market that is getting disrupted. You're not inventing a market. You already have a dictation in mobile apps, which sucks. You already have that desktop note, which was really bad. Now with generative AI, you have much better dict…”

“Most of the internet is still built around text and that is going to shift in a huge way over the next five to 10 years as the models become smarter and more human-like you interact with them in more human-like ways like voice, right? Is the primary way we int…”

“For the first time it's actually can be enjoyable to, and even more convenient to talk to an AI on the phones and talking to a human because you can call any time of the day or night and the interaction is is working pretty well and it sounds really nice and t…”

“And in voice in particular, since the required compute is much lower and is that the same for data, really a few individuals can make stuff that is completely You know, just changing applications at very large scales.”

“In my perception, all the new hardware companies have voice at the heart of the product. All the prototypes that we see, whether it's glasses or pendants or, you know, like the new stuff that Johnny Hive and Sam Altman are working on. Voice is at the heart of …”

“I think today, virtually everything is audio language models because since they are autoregressive, so they run in in a streaming fashion, they are naturally compatible with real-time inference, which is kind of the main topic around voice right now. And so ev…”

“And at the same time, these models are so large, they cannot run at scale because they will just make everyone lose money in the process.”

“With turn taking, we are back at the archaic era of handmade rules, which is ridiculous.”

“You need discipline when you talk to AI. You need to adapt to its flow. Otherwise it's, it gets lost and gets confused and interrupts and so on.”

“So being very selective about when to compute, to use compute, I think that's the only way to, for all of it to make sense economically.”

“There are so many places where what used to cost. 20 dollars an hour because it was a human now is going to cost two dollars an hour because it's an AI in terms of value unlock. That's completely undeniable.”

“But it turns out this is an area where voice AI actually outperforms because humans are actually very good at violating compliance and regulations and voice AI can get it every time.”

“I think it's an unsolved problem still, where I think you have good benchmarks, of course, in LMS, I think in image space, they are pretty good. In voice space, you have, of course, the speech quality, but then so much of whether you like or not the speech dep…”

“And then I think the one that's, that I'm most excited about for the world and for the shift is going to be education, where you will just be able to have, like, effectively a personal tutor on your headphone.”

“Well, I think it's almost, it's basically ready now, so we're only kind of a yearish away, but I think to get it mass market, mass scale, and always get the latency and reliability that we want, probably still, probably, you know, that's coming online in the n…”

“Frankly, I think that the voice thing's overblown. I think that when you work in an office, it's like unrealistic to talk out loud. I think that the voice thing is like useful if you're an executive driving your Tesla to and from work and you want to speak to …”

“In voice, you still will see Pretty, pretty, pretty quick curve. On the lamps, I agree, it's probably a little bit flattening to some extent.”

“The number of researchers in the world working on voice and being exceptional is super small. Probably like 50 to a hundred people at like this top level”

“While it is practically possible to offer a two rupees a minute even today, actually there is no zero margin left for the vendors at this rate.”

“HOAs have a lot of money. It's a good customer to sell into.”

“Without privacy, privacy provisioning, provable security, and an ethical approach that can be shown to the individual you're never going to get them to speak that way.”

“What really worked for us is start the prompt with, I'm an AI, please don't hang up. I'm valuable. Why that's so important is because a lot of people have negative feelings towards AI. They much rather talk to human beings, especially normal people. So as soon…”

“I think it's the killer app for sure. Especially when you combine it with other scents, like if you have it in on your glasses or AirPods or something like that.”

“Now with voice AI and AI agents, it actually can be done by software, not to suggest that the role of the content strategist is obsolete.”

“Like I really think real-time video is going to hit the same inflection point that voice did by the end of the year or early next year.”

“A little bit to everybody's surprise, the voice AI monetization pull actually came from enterprise and B to B use cases. So a little bit, everybody surprised the inflection point with voice AI in terms of monetizable use cases came on the business side. It's l…”

“99% of the monetizable voice AI use cases today are telephony.”

“Go do that for other companies. Every company would pay for that.”

“People talk about hallucinations as this bad thing, but in a lot of ways, for like, kind of this speech-to-speech interaction model, where you're talking to an AI, Hallucination is a feature.”

“Getting that latency end to end down, you know, to 300 milliseconds or 500 milliseconds on average for, like, turn latency that, that, that kind of helps you cross this uncanny valley for voice AI.”

“I think, like, getting that latency end to end down, you know, to 300 milliseconds or 500 milliseconds on average for, like, turn latency that, that, that kind of helps you cross this uncanny valley for voice AI.”

“Voice AI has been an incredible, I think, enabling innovation in the last few years where you can now actually talk to an AI agent on the other line. You may not even know that it's not a human because their conversational abilities and their intonation sounds…”

“Any business that pays a person a hundred, a 150 K a year to answer phone calls is a potential customer of voice AI and, you know, can lead to a really interesting vertical opportunity.”

“I think you, I think it's much easier. It would be much easier to make a system that produces text chats with you that feels like you're texting a human because there's such a compression of like what the entity on the other side is into just like text. Wherea…”

“You need to make decisions at the hundred millisecond, let's say, Time segment so that if you're talking and the other person, you know, starts sort of making some noises that make it seem like they're trying to interrupt you or they want to say something, you…”

“And one of the interesting things here is that this may kind of be technology used in a first line of sort of like, you know, a defense, and then you can kind of bring a human into the loop when sort of like, you know, maybe 50% of these calls go through robot…”

“You know, if you're above three and a half seconds or four seconds latency, it is, it's a frustrating experience. Doesn't matter how capable you are. If you're not fast enough in over voice, it's painful.”

“We're pretty close to someone not being able to detect it at all, and you could say, well, there's an uncanny valley, But I think even now we're up the like back slope of the uncanny valley when it comes to the voice stuff. Like many people will go through a f…”

“It's already being deployed for scams as we speak, including volume scams where you can just use AIs to call people all the time and then narrow down the number of marks and then send it to a human operator to close the deal basically.”

“I disagree that voice is going to be the primary way that we're going to interact with AR.”

“I think that the wave of voice AI I'm most compelled by right now as sort of the twenty-twenty-four kind of, you can see the semblance of, Actually, you know, a new paradigm for mobile. We've kind of had the same thing on mobile for 20 years, and so the abilit…”